Jackson Free Press

The DuBard School for Language Disorders at The University of Southern Mississippi will host the 22nd annual DuBard Symposium Sept. 13-14 at the Thad Cochran Center on the Hattiesburg campus.

The symposium is an educational and networking event where speakers will present on dyslexia and related subjects. The event will feature keynote sessions at the beginning of each day, along with 12 breakout sessions. This year's keynote speakers are Jan Cook and Charles Haynes.

Cook is the dyslexia specialist for the Region 4 Education Service Center in Houston, Texas. The center oversees 49 school districts and 39 charter schools, and creates educational materials for struggling readers. Haynes is a professor and clinical supervisor in the department of communication sciences and disorders at Massachusetts General Hospital's Institute of Health Professions in Boston, where he helped pioneer language-based curricula for children with dyslexia and those with expressive language impairments (they have difficult expressing themselves through speech, writing or gesture).

Session topics at the symposium will include engaging dyslexic readers; auditory processing disorder and dyslexia; dyslexia simulation; predicting and identifying dyslexia; updates on the diagnosis and treatment of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder; and more.

Early discounted registration for the event is available for $115 for professionals and $75 for students until Aug. 30. Standard registrations of $135 and $95, respectively, are available through Sept. 5. For more information and to register online, visit usm.edu/dubard or call 601-266-6777.

Tougaloo College Hosting 2018 Universities Studying Slavery Symposium

Tougaloo College will host the Universities Studying Slavery 2018 Fall Symposium Oct. 24-26. Universities Studying Slavery is a consortium of colleges and universities that are working together to address contemporary and historical issues of race and inequality in higher education, and slavery's legacy in modern U.S. society. The University of Virginia established the consortium in 2014, and more than 40 institutions currently take part. Tougaloo began working with the consortium in 2017.

"The colleges that started Universities Studying Slavery are predominantly white institutions that often had slaves on their campuses and in many cases had slaves that built their campuses," John Rosenthall, president of the Tougaloo College Research and Development Foundation, told the Jackson Free Press. "I learned about the consortium and saw what these universities planned to do, but it seemed like everything they planned, from holding remembrance ceremonies to erecting plaques or taking the names of slave owners off their buildings, would benefit them or their host communities.

"However, the effects of slavery went beyond those college campuses and their communities, so last year, I reached out to (the University of Virginia) and suggested that a collective way for these institutions to address slavery would be through support for HBCUs, which have moved communities of color more than anything else, trained more African American leaders than any other institution and done so much to help get African Americans out of poverty."

HBCUs like Tougaloo need to be involved in this slavery discussion and help shape the outcome, Rosenthall says, and he hopes to leave the symposium with a blueprint to help HBCUs increase their research and contract portfolios with the federal government, as well as generate more income to bolster these institutions.

Tougaloo's Symposium Planning Committee put out a call recently seeking submissions for papers, presentations and panels that cover remembrance and systemic repair for the effects of slavery. Abstracts should be no more than 500 words and must be sent to [email protected] before Sept. 1. Tougaloo will send responses for all submissions and decide which ones to use for the symposium on or before Sept. 15.

Registration for the symposium is open until Oct. 10. For more information, call Rosenthall at 703-624-2257 or email [email protected].

MSU Receives Meteorological American Meteorological Society Award

The American Meteorological Society awarded the East Mississippi Chapter of the National Weather Association, which is Mississippi State University's student meteorological organization, with its 2018 Local Student Chapter of the Year Award this week.

MSU student representatives will travel to Phoenix in January 2019 to formally accept the award at the AMS annual meeting.

The university's meteorological organization received the award for its recent efforts in raising money for tornado and hurricane victims, as well as for coordinating the second-largest regional meteorological conference in the country, a release from MSU says.

For more information about MSU's NWA chapter, visit cas.msstate.edu or geosciences.msstate.edu.