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CU women win a heart-stopper in PAC 12
Jan 7th
Meagan Malcolm-Peck hit a free throw with 12.5 seconds left to provide the winning point and the CU defense stepped up to hold off Washington State in the final possession.
Jen Reese garned a double-double in a win against Washington State Saturday, helping the Buffs to a 2-1 PAC record.
CU (13-1, 2-1 Pac-12) avoided a second straight loss and handed Washington State (9-7, 3-1) its first defeat in conference play.
Freshman Jen Reese had her first career double-double (12 points, 12 rebounds). Chucky Jeffery and Julie Seabrook just missed double-doubles. Jeffery had 12 points and nine rebounds, while Seabrook had 11 points and nine rebounds.
The Buffs trailed by 11 when coach Linda Lappe called a timeout. A 12-3 run coming out of that timeout got the Buffs back into the game.
Washington State again threatened to pull away, however, taking a 56-50 lead with 2:35 to play.
Jeffery and Lexy Kresl hit back-to-back shots to pull the Buffs within two. Then, with 37 seconds left, Kresl hit a spinning jumper to beat the shot clock and tie the game.
After the defense got a stop on the Cougars, Malcolm-Peck went 1-for-2 from the line to give the Buffs their first lead since early in the second half.
A jumper from Washington State’s Jazmine Perkins was off the mark at the buzzer.
Colorado out-scored the Cougars 22-10 after Lappe’s timeout, including 7-0 in the final 2:30
Keeping families together earns Boulder County and award
Jan 6th
Frank Alexander honored for his relentless work to improve the child welfare system
Boulder County, Colo. – Frank Alexander, Director of Boulder County’s Department of Housing and Human Services, is being honored with an Excellence for Children Award by Casey Family Programs, one of the nation’s leading advocates for improving the child welfare system.
Alexander will receive a Jurisdiction Award on Jan. 19 in Seattle, recognizing his record of significantly improving outcomes for Boulder County’s children and families, his leadership with the Colorado Human Services Directors Association, and his successful collaboration with other county, state and judicial partners.
“As much as anything else, this is a recognition of how our community and our state have come together to make sure those who need help are getting it,” Alexander said. “I am honored to work with so many incredible partners as we focus on building an innovative foundation of support for our neighbors.”
Under Alexander’s leadership, the Department of Housing and Human Services (BCDHHS) is moving toward a model of “permanency” for children that includes family preservation and kin support by helping young people locate loved ones or family friends who will care for them. As a result, Boulder County has seen a 40 percent reduction in out-of-home child placements since 2009, and now has the lowest foster care rate in Colorado.
He has worked with Casey Family Programs on a number of successful initiatives. These include No Time to Lose, the statewide expansion of permanency roundtables, strengthening the partnership with the Annie E. Casey assessment, and focusing on child welfare financing reform.
Susan Kelly, senior director of strategic consulting for Casey Family Programs, nominated Alexander for the Excellence for Children Award. “Frank has shown himself to be an outstanding leader in Boulder County and amongst his peers in the state and across the country,” Kelly said. “He is creative and innovative, and he excels in promoting the well-being of families.”
Background: Alexander’s vision has led to positive, rapid change
In three years as director, Frank Alexander has led a comprehensive redesign of the housing and human services system. Among other things, this has helped expand the numbers of people served by benefits by up to 140 percent, with much of this growth focused on front-end prevention that has reduced the need for more intensive and expensive down-the-line services and helped stabilize families. This prevention focus has led to reductions in evictions, foreclosures, homelessness, hospitalizations, detentions, and out-of-home placements of children.
Alexander has also helped drive partnerships across county and state divisions, including with community services, mental health, and public health agencies. Through these collaborations, he has developed an array of award-winning creative programs for Boulder County, including:
• the Housing Stabilization Program,
• the Foreclosure Prevention Program,
• the Boulder County Healthy Kids initiative,
• the Medical Home Initiative,
• An Early Intervention Program focused on connecting people earlier with needed services,
• the Colorado PEAK Statewide Training and Toolkit Initiative,
• comprehensive work internships and green-collar jobs development programs, and
• housing development programs and partnerships in the county’s Human Services/Housing Master Planning processes.
In 2010, Alexander was a key advocate for the passage of Boulder County Initiative 1A, also known as the Temporary Human Services Safety Net (TSN). This 0.9 mill levy increase on property taxes is designed to backfill state budget cuts and address increased caseloads. In 2011, the TSN provided over $5 million in funding for emergency services for Boulder County, which along with boosting access to food assistance and medical care, also helped address a child care assistance waiting list that had grown to 650 children. Details on the TSN and its impacts are available at www.bouldercountyTSN.org.
Alexander was elected president of the Colorado Human Services Directors Association (CHSDA) in 2010, and has been instrumental in both its reorganization and in the redesign of the state’s human services system.
Dirty Laundry: the Naked Curmudgeon blasts TV reporters stupid questions
Dec 28th
People have been upset with bearers of bad news at least as far back as the days of Sophocles, Euripedes and Aeschylus, the writers of tragedies in which a messenger could be killed just for bringing the king some bad news.
Nowadays, we don’t kill the journalists for giving us bad news; we seem to thrive on it and demand they give us more.
Oh, every decade or so there will be complaints that newspapers just report bad news and never good news, and some newspaper will be started that proudly proclaims it will print only good news. Then it will lose money and go out of business, because people are more interested in tragic events than in happy events … unless, of course, the events happen to them.
Remember, the Greeks invented tragedies before they invented comedies. Bad news allows us to feel good about ourselves, to feel pity for the sufferers and fear that the events could happen to us and to achieve a catharsis of those emotions.
Comedies, however, make us laugh and allow us to feel smug about our happiness. Greek tragedies were about the nobility, but comedies were about common people. Then the moralists of the 16th and 17th centuries decided that the purpose of comedy was not only to amuse and entertain, but also to instruct.
So, what would you rather read about (or more likely these days, watch on TV), the latest scandals about Washington politicians, foreign nobility and Hollywood stars or the fact that the reported number of crimes went down last month?
Bad news doesn’t usually come with the admonition that we shouldn’t act this way, but have you noticed how popular TV sit-coms usually end with a moral?
When I was young, I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. I was fascinated with the challenge of gathering all the facts about a story and then writing those facts according to journalistic formulas so that the least common denominator, Everyreader, could understand them without difficulty.
However, newspaper reporters didn’t make very much money, Woodward and Bernstein hadn’t made investigative journalism fashionable yet and the epitome of TV journalism was Edward R. Murrow, not some blow-dried performer who just reads the teleprompter.
Later, whenever any argument arose about journalism, I always defended the reporters. They were doing their job. Bad things happen. People would rather hear about bad news than good news.
News reporter messes up, calls herself stupid on… by Christian_Carrion
And yet I have become extremely upset with TV reporters and their stupid questions.
Why ask an accused criminal “Did you do it?” Do you believe a criminal will suddenly confess on national TV instead of to the police? Does another denial give the audience any more insight about the story?
Why ask anyone “How do you feel?” How do you believe anybody feels after tragically losing a loved one, surviving an accident or winning the Super Bowl?
And why do journalists insist on inserting their own opinions? I have a rule of never answering a question beginning with a negative. “Don’t you feel the proposed health plan will cost the taxpayers too much money?” is a weak way to ask for someone’s opinion, because the reporter’s opinion overshadows the question and any answer.
I have always wanted to be part of an important story, just so I could counter reporters’ stupid questions.
“Did I do it? That’s a stupid question.”
“I feel like you have just asked another stupid question.”
“Don’t you feel that by asking your question that way, you are just giving your own opinion instead of asking for mine?”
And speaking of opinions, who cares what the public believes? Why do so many TV and radio shows keep asking for public opinions? A Denver morning TV “news” program once asked, “Does it seem like you have a lot of bad hair days?” Back then people actually paid money to call in their one little vote.
Why are there so many daytime talk shows? In 1961 Jackie Gleason probably started the first prime-time TV talk show when he sat down with just one guest and they simply talked. I believe Phil Donahue established the pattern of involving audiences, taking phone calls and having guests with unusual problems or stories.
Perhaps fascination with dirty laundry is nothing more than wanting to feel fear and pity for the catharsis, being able to feel smug at the absurdity of other people’s lives and watching tragedies about the common folk for a change.
I rest my case.
The Naked Curmudgeon
Dan Culberson