Education

By Mary Beth Versaci/For CU-CitizenAccess.org/A Behavioral Intervention Team is made up of representatives from offices across the University of Illinois campus meets once a week to discuss students whose behavior can be considered disruptive and concerning to the rest of the campus community.

This behavior oftentimes does not require disciplinary action, but it has reached a level of concern and needs to be addressed before it escalates, said Ken Ballom, dean of students.

By Christen Grumstrup/For CU-CitizenAccess -- As tuition rises at the University of Illinois, the middle class student is facing the most financial pressure, say financial aid officials and students.

Sandy Street, the director of the University Office for Planning and Budgeting for all three university campuses, says that the middle class is most affected by tuition cost because they are the ones that “don’t get the state aid.”

By Rubina Ali/For CU-CitizenAccess/ Food insecurity – not knowing where your next meal will come from – is a problem that more and more people face every day. Even children.

But a program right in Champaign County is providing relief to kids from families who experience food insecurity.

The BackPack Program sends in-need children home on Friday afternoons with backpacks full of food to make sure there’s enough to eat over the weekend. According to a 2009 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, nearly 50 million people, including one in four children, struggle to get enough food to eat.

By Jessica Bourque / For CU-CitizenAccess — In a stuffy, dimly lit basement located in downtown Urbana, Ella Kinzie sits hunched over at a table, a pile of unopened letters by her side. She is hard at work, doing a job similar to Santa Claus’s, reading over wish lists and turning them into realities.

She sends a cookbook to Cristina, who wants to learn how to bake cupcakes, a Spanish- English dictionary to Alejandro, who longs to speak better English, and an advertising book to Maurice, who wishes to start his own business one day.  

“Even the most ordinary requests are special to me because it’s like these few books are going to make such a difference in that person’s quality of life,” said Kinzie.

By Matthew Schroyer/For CU-CitizenAccess — The Odyssey Project in Champaign is an affiliate of the Bard Clemente Course in the Humanities, which began offering college-level courses to economically and educationally disadvantaged adults in 1995 out of the Roberto Clemente Family Guidance Center in Manhattan, N.Y. Since then, courses under the Bard Clemente name have been taught more than 100 times, and in 14 states and the District of Columbia. 

Like the Bard Clemente Course, the Odyssey Project gives all students free instruction and course materials, such as textbooks and flash drives to save computer documents.

CHAMPAIGN --- For the fourth time this decade, the Don Moyer Boys & Girls Club is appealing for community help to keep its doors open.

CHAMPAIGN -- Mason Hurtado is an athletic boy with an enormous smile and neatly trimmed hair. He is a sixth-grader at Franklin Middle School in Champaign, where he takes college preparatory classes and participates in chess club, basketball and, come January, wrestling.

Inside the classroom, he looks just like any of his peers. But when he leaves school at the end of the day, Mason heads home to a two-room apartment filled to the ceiling with clothes, toys and other pieces of his family’s life from before they were homeless.