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Public Education

The Deep Recession Is Creating Widespread Deficits

The national recession is producing both declines in state and local revenues and has increased the need for public programs as residents lose jobs, income, and health insurance. In the 2009 and 2010 fiscal years, the imbalance between available revenues and what was needed for services opened up budget gaps in most states.

In addition, states have now addressed significant budget shortfalls in enacting their 2011 budgets and even more budget gaps are projected for fiscal year 2012. Since the start of the recession, states have closed over $425 billion in budget shortfalls. Sizable budget gaps are likely to continue for the next several years.

Virtually all states are required to balance their operating budgets each year or biennium. Unlike the federal government, states cannot maintain services during an economic downturn by running a deficit. States had record reserves heading into this recession, but those have mostly been drawn down. Since federal economic assistance is slated to expire well before state budgets have recovered, states must address remaining shortfalls with a combination of spending cuts and/or tax increases.

Cuts Continue to Deepen, Affect Wide Range of Services

States began cutting their budgets in the spring of 2008, as the recession brought sharply weakened revenues. The cuts have intensified in the face of high and persistent unemployment. Even as the need for state-funded services rose, states cut funding for services by 4.2 percent for fiscal year 2009 and an additional 6.8 percent for 2010, according to estimates by the National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO). NASBO projects that state spending for 2011 will remain 7.6 percent below 2008 levels.[2] Indeed, the cuts that many states have enacted for FY2011 have been even more severe than those implemented in previous years.

Service agencies hate it when they really need more money to achieve their goals and objective but the use of innovative technologies is one of many factors that may serve to increase the potential that goals are reached. At EdStar, we know that every little bit counts and how fast the savings add up thanks to our modern technology. We are dedicated to continuing our role of advising on new issues and research and responding to the events of today and planning for the needs of tomorrow.

SAT reading scores for graduating high school seniors reached the lowest point in four decades, the Washington Post tells us. Never before have so many children come out of school virtually illiterate and helpless in a world where reading comprehension becomes more and more important in finding and keeping a good job; and employers are more and more disappointed with the low intellectual and educational level of the young generation of employees.

And that’s the public schools. Private school and homeschool students are doing just fine. It is that same government system of K-12 schools that lives off the money of all taxpayers that produces the failures. While there are many opposing theories as to why this debacles exists it is clear that increased parental involvement yields better results in a child's education.

So while school districts across the nation feel compelled to pour more money into a system that very often delivers undesirable results, the National Council For Better Schools has utilized EdStar technology that can dramatically increase parental involvement. But here's the thing; their T.I.C.E.P. program is totally free to any public school district.

T.I.C.E.P.'s multilevel technology was developed to allow teachers to effortlessly and directly inform parents about student academic and/or behavioral problems or successes on a daily basis. Parent contact for every student in an entire class of twenty-five students can be completed in less than five minutes per day.

Social Services

As the nation enters a period of economic uncertainty, many of the 50 million Americans living near or below the poverty line are more vulnerable than at any time in recent years. With budget cuts to local, state and federal governments have had a significant impact on the ability to get the appropriate social services to many individuals in need, more assistive technologies must be developed to mitigate the ramifications of budget shortfalls.

EdStar has therefore researched ways that our proprietary technology might provide an inexpensive way to deliver needed services. We have developed a multi-platform application, Therapeutic Short Messaging Service (TSMS), which can become a very significant tool for use by social service professionals.

Our TSMS is the backbone of our A.T.L.A.S. Program geared towards helping youths diagnosed with certain types of special needs.

Mental Health

The usefulness of TSMS technology to enhance a mental health care system is in direct relationship to the extent that it is integrated as another tool within the array of service approaches. Ideally, the goal of an effective telemental health network is to have a transparent vehicle--the technology--to carry out the established mental health services mission.

For mental health care providers and consumers in rural and frontier America, the future is now. Interactive TSMS and information technologies make it possible for mental health providers to literally be in two places at once, extending scarce resources to individuals, and to entire regions, that are medically underserved.

Our TSMS technology is also an extremely inexpensive tool to have clients receive frequent contact from a mental health care provider. Additionally, our TSMS service bundle very often become an incentive for positive client behavior.

Although telecommunication technologies have been used for some 40 years to provide limited mental health interventions, mostly on an experimental basis, more research needs to be done in the area of client outcomes as a result of telemental health services.

Community Corrections

EdStar's technology to improve the tracking, location, monitoring of, and communicating with non violent offenders is perhaps the most cost effective and efficient way to achieve the goals of community corrections.

What is of interest is that our Therapeutic Short Message Service (TSMS) may also be highly appropriate for use with predatory and violent offenders in all environments within the community. The technology is also a two-way communication system that sends specific individualized messages and can also be used to remind special needs offenders of appointments, medication schedules, or any new requirements.

Enhancing intrinsic motivation in offenders is somewhat different from motivation needed for self-improvement.

Many of us are resistant to change, as are some high-risk offenders, but the difference is that offenders are being told

they must change. Our TSMS may be able to encourage or stimulate internal motivation among individuals on community supervision.

There are several ways by which TSMS monitoring can contribute to bringing out such motivation by providing offenders with external control, by monitoring their behaviors and communicating with them in a way that breaks down areas of ambivalence to pro-social norms.

It may be that officers are working with an individual that has never been out of prison successfully for a year during his or her adult life. If, for instance, this individual manages to remain in the community for two years, then the community corrections agency has made progress with this person.

There are many ways to measure whether or not an individual or officer has been successful, and sometimes officers need to consider the individual case to determine whether progress has been made. It is not so much that individuals defined as high-risk cannot or do not want to change, but rather that they face hurdles—more so than with those defined as low-risk—and it is in recognizing this that electronic supervision technologies may help officers do their job.

Our TSMS supervision technology should be an additional tool to consider for incorporating into an individualized case management plan. EdStar's TSMS is perhaps the most cost effective and efficient supervision tool currently available.

Can Drastically Reduce Spending In Several Vital Departments Of State Governments.

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