Monthly Archives: March 2021

Bills introduced in the Florida House and Senate would offer differing levels of COVID-19 liability protections for assisted living communities and other long-term care settings.

The Senate legislation, SB 74, would require plaintiffs to provide sufficient detail that a provider was grossly negligent or engaged in intentional misconduct in causing death or harm in COVID-19-related lawsuits. The bill also would provide immunity for claims related to supplies or personnel not readily available or not available at a reasonable cost to comply with COVID-19 standards.

In addition to assisted living communities, the legislation also would protect other healthcare providers, such as adult family care homes, companion and homemaker services, home health agencies, nursing homes, home medical equipment providers, adult day centers and hospices.

The House bill, HB 7005, would require an affidavit signed by a physician attesting that the claim is a result of a provider acting grossly negligent or with intentional misconduct. Plaintiffs also would be required to prove that providers did not make a good faith effort to substantially comply with public health standards or guidance in effect at the time of the action.

The House version would eliminate the protections after a year. Claims would need to be brought within one year of COVID-19-related death, hospitalization or diagnosis.

Jason Hand, vice president of public policy and legal affairs for the Florida Senior Living Association, told McKnights Senior Living that COVID liability protections are the No. 1 concern of the groups members during this legislative session.

Assisted living communities should be protected, Hand said, because they were not licensed, designed, staffed or trained to house residents with communicable diseases. For the past year, however, they were asked to ignore that rule to keep hospital surge numbers down, he added.

Although hospital staff members have been held up as heroes, assisted living staff members, Hand said, are being demonized for going outside of their swim lane at the request of the federal and state governments.

They did everything they could with what they had, he said. They want to know the states going to have their back. At the end of the day they are looking for some protections from frivolous lawsuits.

Kristen Knapp told McKnights Senior Living that the Florida Health Care Association supports these two bills as part of its top legislative priorities this session.

Given the overwhelming and nationwide impact of the pandemic, the initial shortages of PPE and testing, the lack of scientific certainty about treatments and methods of transmission, and the fact that long-term care providers were being forced to step outside of their intended scopes, we believe our frontline healthcare workers and their care centers should not be held liable for the spread of COVID-19 or care directly impacted by the crisis if they made a good faith effort to comply with government issues and standards, said Knapp, FHCAs director of communications.

The association, she added, is advocating for preventing the threat of excessive litigation through sue and settle tactics that could push the long-term care sector to an economic breaking point and drive up defense and claims costs. The plaintiffs bar is already positioning itself to profit from this tragic situation by organizing tort actions, she said, adding that three of FHCAs member companies collectively are facing more than 112 potential lawsuits.

If providers are going to recover and continue meeting residents care needs into the future, weve got to ensure their resources arent diverted from the care center floor to the courthouse steps, Knapp said. We need to keep them invested in our workforce, technologies and training, as well as infection prevention supplies, to ensure the health, safety and well-being of the residents entrusted to their care.

LeadingAge Florida President and CEO Steve Bahmer said that the bills strike an appropriate balance that ensures that COVID-19 claims can be filed where legitimate actions of gross negligence or intentional misconduct may have occurred.

SB 74 and HB 7005 preserve the rights of residents and their families to sue, while extending limited liability protections to healthcare providers who did everything in their power to comply with federal, state or local laws, regulations or ordinances, Bahmer said. Reasonable liability protection makes sense for long-term care providers, and we look forward to working with the Florida Legislature and other key stakeholders on these important bills.

Legal teams for both long-term care operators and the residents and families affected by the pandemic are gearing up for lawsuits alleging neglect and wrongful death as a result of the virus. Many industry leaders have been advocating for federal protections for the senior living and care industries against COVID-19 related lawsuits.

COVID liability laws also are topping the 2021 priority lists for legislators in Alabama, Missouri and Nebraska.

To date, 21 states and the District of Columbia have enacted some level of COVID-19 liability protections, according to the American Tort Reform Association. From March to December 2020, $34.4 million was spent on TV advertisements for legal services and / or soliciting legal claims mentioning COVID-19 or coronavirus.

Florida accounted for approximately 20% of all legal service TV ads and spending on ads mentioning COVID-19 or coronavirus, at $6.6 million, according to the ATRA. During that same time period, 7,734 lawsuits related to COVID-19 were filed in the United States.

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Bills would protect assisted living communities as operators look for state to 'have their back' during pandemic - News - McKnight's Senior Living

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Anissa Weier, seen here with her attorney Joseph Smith Jr. during a hearing in 2017, is petitioning a judge to be conditionally released from a state mental health facility. She will appear before Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Michael Bohren on Wednesday, March 10.(Photo: C.T. Kruger / Now News Group)

One of the women involved in the Slender Man stabbing will soon appear before the Waukesha County Circuit Court judge who sentenced her to 25 years in a state mental facility to request her release.

Anissa Weier, now 19 years old, has spent the last 3 years at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute after a jury found her not criminally responsible due to a mental disease in the stabbing that nearly killed a classmate in a sensationalized crime that gained worldwide coverage.

Weier was 12 when she and Morgan Geyser lured Payton Leutner into the woods, stabbed her 19 times and told police they did so to appease a fictional internet horror character named Slender Man.

Weier received the maximum sentence in December 2017 after more than three years of mental evaluations, failed attempts to get the case moved to juvenile court and after she eventuallypleaded guilty to attempted second-degree intentional homicide, a lesser offense than she was originally charged.

TIMELINE: How the Waukesha Slender Man stabbing case played out over the years

Now, on March 10, Weier is seeking her conditional release into the community.

Here are 10 answers to questions about what we know ahead of the in-person hearing at the Waukesha County Courthouse.

According to court documents and previous testimony, Weier plotted for months with Geyser when they were in sixth gradeto kill Leutner after becoming enthralled withSlender Man through the Creepypasta Wiki website.Weier and Geyser said in order to become proxies of Slender Man they believed they had to kill someone or face retribution. They would execute theiract during Geyser's 12th birthday party on May 31, 2014.

Weier told police they planned on stabbing Leutner in a park bathroom but that plan fell through. They then ventured into the woods for a game of hide-and-seek at Weier's suggestion. The two would then pin Leutner down. Weier had the knife, but she gave it to Geyser and issued instructions for Geyser to stab Leutner."Go ballistic, go crazy," she told Geyser.

Weier and Geyser left Leutner to die. Weier said she told Leutner to be quiet so she wouldn't draw attention to herself. A passing bicyclist found Leutner and she was rushed into emergency surgery.

Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Bohren will determine whether Anissa Weier still poses "a significant risk" of bodily harm to herself or others or ofseriously damagingproperty if conditionally released.(Photo: Michael Sears / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Michael Bohren has presided over the case since the beginning. He has since moved away from the criminal division but has stayed with Weier's and Geyser's cases.

Based on Wisconsin Department of Health Services' conditional release program, Bohren will consider whether Weier poses a danger.

If Bohren finds "clear and convincing evidence" that Weier poses "a significant risk" of bodily harm to herself or others or ofseriously damagingproperty if conditionally released, he would deny her request.

During the early parts of the case, most notably when the girls were attempting to get their cases transferred out of adult court, Bohren maintained that "longer-term control" over Geyser and Weier was "necessary" to ensure protection to the public.

If they were tried in juvenile court, they would have beenincarcerated for three years and had community supervision with treatment until they were 18. In adult court, they faced the possibility of decades in prison. Since Weier and Geyser were initially charged with attempted first-degree intentional homicide, they were automatically tried as adults.

At Weier's sentencing hearing in December 2017, Bohren said that although he sawWeier as remorseful and mature, a report of Weier talking about making aOuija board at the West Bend Juvenile Detention Center and of it unleashing spirits was "startling."

"It was a planned murderby kids," Bohren said. "We can't forget the goal was to kill."

"Anissa could not conform her conduct to the requirements of the law," Melissa Westendorf, a forensic psychologist, tells jurors as she testified for the defense during the trial of Anissa Weier in Waukesha County Circuit Court in 2017.(Photo: Rick Wood / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

During the conditional release hearing, Bohren will listen to medical professionals who evaluated Weier in recent months.

Weier'sdad said he didn't see any signs of mental illness leading up to the stabbing.

But psychologists saidWeier suffered from a shared delusional disorder due to Geyser's undiagnosed schizophrenia, preventing Weier from conforming her conduct to the law.

Michael Caldwell, a staff psychologist at Mendota Mental Health Institute, believedWeier also suffered from persistent depressive disorder and schizotypy, a condition along the schizophrenia spectrum.

RELATED: What the Lifetime movie 'Terror in the Woods' changed and didn't change about Waukesha Slender Man stabbing

Psychologist MelissaWestendorf said Geyser's medical condition, along with her own belief in Slender Man, created a "perfect storm" of events.

Westendorf was again assigned to evaluate Weier ahead of her conditional release hearing, along with psychiatristRobertRawski and forensic psychologist DeborahCollins.

Weier will return to a secure mental health facility, likely at Winnebago. Weier can petition every six months for her conditional release.

Weier would be assigned case managers that would provide services to her to become "successful and productive" in society, according to DHS' conditional release program.

Bohren would set terms of Weier's conditional release, but she would be monitored until she is 37 years old, the length of her commitment (she was credited with the 3 years she served at the West Bend jail).If she would violate terms, her conditional release could be revoked.

As part of her plea with the state in 2017, she agreed that shewouldn't request her release forat least three years.

The state's conditional release program is meant toprovidesupport to people living with a mental illness who have committed a crime. Most of these people, like Weier,have committed a felony, DHS said.

In her petition to the court late last year, Weier said she "would not pose a significant risk of bodily harm to self or others or cause serious property damage, if released under specific conditions."

Payton Leutner, left, is interviewed by ABC's David Muir for the news program, "20/20," in 2019 about the Slender Man stabbing five years earlier. As a 12-year-old, Leutner was stabbed 19 times by her former classmate and friend in Waukesha.(Photo: Associated Press)

In an interview with the ABC news program "20/20" in 2019, Leutner said she doesn't fear for Weier's and Geyser's eventual releases.

"If they ever come near methey're going right back in," Leutner said. "When they get out I don't think it's going to change my life at all."

But she and her mother in letters to the court and in TV interviews have said that the scars both physical and emotional remain. Payton's mother, Stacie, wrote to the court in 2017 that Payton agreed that treatment in a secure hospital was the best place for Weier and Geyser, though she wouldn't feel safe if they're released without supervision.

Geyser is serving a 40-year sentence the maximum at a mental health facility.

She worked out a plea agreement with prosecutors in which she avoided trial and pleaded guiltyto attempted first-degree intentional homicide but that her mental illness was the cause.

Geyser'splea deal allows her topetition for conditional release every six months. She has not done sobut had been fightingBohren's ruling that juvenile court was the appropriate venue and that her statements to police the day of the stabbing were a violation of her rights and should not have been used in court.

ContactChristopher Kuhagen at (262) 446-6634or christopher.kuhagen@jrn.com. Followhim on Twitter at @ckuhagenand our newsroom Instagram accounts at MyCommunityNow and Lake Country Now.

Our subscribers make this reporting possible. Please consider supporting local journalism by subscribing to the Journal Sentinel at jsonline.com/deal.

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A woman involved in the Slender Man stabbing is requesting conditional release. Here's what to know. - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Chick-fil-As annual $5 million grant program, the True Inspiration Award, has new criteria for 2022: All nominees must either be majority Black-led or serve communities of color. The decision to focus the awards for this year is part of the quick-service chains pledge to take action against racial justice, according to the company.

Developed in 2015, this annual award distribution is meant to honor the chains founder, S. Truett Cathy, and finance organizations that help local communities and serve others.

Atlanta-based Chick-fil-A defines a Black-ked organization as an organization with majority Black board of directors, executive leadership and staff.

By refocusing our annual awards, we are taking an intentional step to support leaders and organizations that are finding solutions to address key systemic issues experienced by many Black children and families, the company website states.

The eligibility requirements include:

Applications are open from March 1 through May 31.

There will be 34 winners announced in January 2022. Grants will range from $50,000 to $350,000. It is not required that a Chick-fil-A operator submit an organization, but some awards are only available for those submitted by operators.

More information on the awards can be found here.

The 2021 top category winners include DuBois Integrity Academy, Homeboy Industries, Yonge Street Mission, St. Paul CDC, C5 Youth Foundation Inc., Wheeler Mission, HOPE Multiplied, City Kids Wilderness Project, Lifestyles of Maryland Foundation and Good News Community Kitchen.

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Chick-fil-A's annual $5 million True Inspiration Award is now exclusively for Black-led organizations or those that serve communities of color -...

There is no doubt that the COVID19 pandemic has radically revolutionized teaching methods and student interactions in the classroom. Like millions of teachers around the world not formally prepared for this global pandemic, it was quite challenging as an early-career second language writing instructor to meet and interact with my students who were often multilingual writers stuck in small chat windows. InMarch 2020, I wrote an article on how instructors can be mindful of online classroom management while also keeping in mind the redesign of their syllabi for online instruction. However, I believe we now need to think beyond classroom management and reflect on our own teaching methods, focusing on online strategies to better establish learning communities.

Building a community often establishes more interactive classrooms. However, building a sense of community among learners via computer-aided resources for seamless learning can be challenging in the remote world. Many instructors who already incorporate technology in their teaching pedagogies have recognized the ability of online tools to help support learning community development.To encourage my students to become supportive of one another despite facing a pandemic, I use five online tools that support community building, both in-person and online. These resources include:

I often use the Argis Story Maps application for my students to submit their essay outlines in an interactive and engaging format. This resource helps my students show their understanding of specific concepts and how they would structure their essay by using multimodal features such as YouTube links, maps, songs, pictures, and other resources. It also provides my students with the opportunity to explain their ideas and critical arguments through an alternative platform while making the language acquisition process relatively more comfortable.

With many classes being offered asynchronously, Padlet is a useful platform for keeping your students engaged in conversations related to your course topics. Additionally, this resource also facilitates an informal dedicated space for our learners to express their interests, passions, habits, opinions, and hobbies on the topics that matter most to them. The application can also foster organic communication points in class and could be one way of helping students connect with peers with similar interests while also encouraging different brainstorming ideas as a class.

Socractive is a formative assessment tool and serves almost any grade level. Instructors can create quizzes and track their students progress in either asynchronous or synchronous class formats via autogenerated and live performance reports. Students can also receive instant feedback based on their performance, and instructors can customize their comments to help keep personal touch points with their students. The summary provided of overall student performance can also help instructors distinguish what topics need more instructional support and provide teachers sufficient time to prepare their lectures in advance.

TED Ed videos can be great conversation starters for any class when introducing a new topic. TED Talks can help teachers create intentional opportunities for students to be part of a cultivating learning community with the help of more in-depth discussions. I usually include these videos in my lessons and provide a few response questions, where students first watch the TED Talk video together and then discuss the focus questions after. During discussion, I find that my students find community with one another and expand on ideas they may have never considered.

Grammarly is great for online writing assistance and can be used as a plagiarism checker tool. It provides an opportunity for early writers to self-reflect on their writings, especially when they might feel reluctant to ask for support during the initial learning phase. Instructors can introduce this tool as a language scaffold to teach the importance of content and style while writing in a specific genre. Tools such as Grammarlys plagiarism checker can be used to help students be more conscious of plagiarism. Overall, this tool can help struggling writers take small steps towards developing more confidence and self-sufficiency in their writing.

I thoroughly enjoyed using these online tools for different purposes, such as brainstorming activities or assessing my students understanding of concepts at different learning stages. These tools were useful in establishing meaningful communication both with my students and among my students to minimize online learning stress, foster a learning community, and retain their interest in the course.

Saurabh Anand is a TESOL educator, PhD student of language and literacy education at the University of Georgia, and in 2021, the International Literacy Association awarded him the30 Under 30honor.

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Five Online Tools to Help Support a Learning Community in Your Course - Faculty Focus

February 27, 2021 | :

by David Fuentes, Francisco Daz, Maribel Rodriguez, Elena Sabogal, Daisy Rodriguez and Johanna Torres,

Francisco Daz

Recent changes and disruptions to teaching and learning at our university related to the pandemic were preceded by a demographic shift in our student body resulting in our University becoming both a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) and Minority Serving Institution (MSI) in 2015. Servicing approximately 10,000 students in Northern New Jersey, William Paterson University has a student population comprised of 60% Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), a composition which consists of students who self-identify as 35% Latinx, 19% Black, and 6% Asian.

The shift in our student population revealed structural and pedagogical concerns that led to the development of several task forces aimed at addressing and understanding how to better serve our increasingly diverse student population. Among them was the HSI task force, who among others, received charges by our University President, Richard Helldobler, asking us to recommend ways and strategies that our higher education institution could move beyond being a Hispanic enrolling institution towards becoming a Hispanic Serving one.

Forming an intentional group to address equity

Our HSI task force, which consisted of three faculty, and four staff, one who is an A.V.P., and two student representatives, all who identify as Latinx and bilingual, represented a variety of lived experiences, from a variety of countries including: Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Peru and the United States. Together, we took up the charge of understanding the Latinx student experience and making recommendations for institutional change. Our shared Latinx backgrounds as a task force placed us in a unique position to take up our charge and marked a shift in our universitys structural approach towards institutional improvementthe intentional grouping of Latinx faculty and staff to address issues of equity for Latinx students.

The need for our task force was significant as we understood that Latinx students had been historically underserved on our campus, and nationwide, and as a result were underperforming as evidenced by key university indicators such as 4- and 6-year graduation rates and retention rates year to year. We had recently become aware that Latinx and Black students on our campus experienced disparate outcomes, as institutional data analysis highlighted these demographic disparities. The combined trajectory of increased diverse enrollment coupled with the understanding that BIPOC students experienced unequal outcomes compared to white peers, painted a bleak picture for our future enrollments unless we were able to effectively change course.

Dr. David Fuentes

Working as an intentional group to better understand the Latinx student experience

The HSI task force worked to understand the Latinx student experience by hosting focus groups. Open calls were made to the Latinx student community with just over 3,000 invitations sent. We hosted several focus groups ranging in size from 8-12 and repeated across forums in each of our five colleges, in the residence halls, and with several Greek life student groups. We also surveyed the entire Latinx student population with questions aimed at eliciting how and why they persisted at WP. Through our focus group interactions with the students a few central themes arose: the importance of representation, what it meant for students to see faculty and staff that looked like them, how it increased their self-efficacy and sense of belonging to meet as a group, and how for many, they never knew so many Latinx faculty worked at their university [as an aside, our Latinx students referred to all university employees as faculty]. This sentiment was true for us, the Latinx faculty, as well, as few of us had previously been asked to work across units and university silos, certainly not as a group of Latinx faculty and staff. The intentional selection of Latinx faculty and staff to form a task force to understand how to better support Latinx students, marked an important shift from institutional prior practice and represents an important structural consideration to better serve Latinx communities.

The dialogic impact of working as an intentional groupCaf Con Leche

Just as our Latinx students expressed high levels of affect and engagement as reported by their increased sense of belonging when interacting with Latinx faculty, so too did we as faculty experience mutual benefits and gains from working as a Latinx community. We quickly realized that one of the most important structural changes needed for our Latinx community, and by default our university, was to support increased opportunities for affinity groups and intentional group gatherings encouraging students, and faculty to create communitiescommunities that we believed could lead to increased student outcomes. One such community that the HSI task force imagined could help build the kind of dialogic, mutually beneficial community for students, staff and faculty to grow, was called Caf Con Leche, a university wide support network of Latinx faculty, staff, and students who host weekly gatherings.

Programmatic touching and creating support before its neededCaf Con Leche

Caf con Leche, virtual and physical meetings hosted by Latinx staff and faculty, are weekly themed gatherings that are often responsive to students needs. The entire campus community is invited to celebrate Latinx culture and heritage. The atmosphere is vibrant, conversation is lively, hands are moving, smiles abound, the room is filled with positive affect and Latinx flare. It is a safe space for many, particularly those in our community who have ties and experiences within Latinx communities and those who like good coffee. Students come and go at their own pace, many of the same faces arrive week after week, some new faces come each week; sometimes students have specific inquiries, trials and tribulations to share, and other times they are just looking for a break and smiling face. For many Latinx students, Caf Con Leche reminds them of home!

Caf con Leche serves as a key university touch point for many of our Latinx students. It has been designed as one-stop-shop for students where we developed a network of Latinx faculty known as Madrinas y Padrinos (godmother and godfather) who are able to either answer student inquiries directly or facilitate a connection with someone else who can, generally providing the kind of university navigation strategies that many Latinx, first-generation college students may benefit from having in a structured way. The design of the program has sought to invite directors, associate directors or members of the offices where student services reside. The goal was to close the gap between the services the university offers and with the real-time needs of students. By bringing the offices to the students, we realized that we could avail our services to students in ways that resonated better with them culturally, and affectively. This need and desire to match students needs with university support services was never more evident than during the beginning of the pandemic as many of our students experienced hardships consistent with living and learning at Covid Ground Zero. During the height of the pandemic in our region, we realized that Caf Con Leche served a very important role, a role that our traditional student services were less capable of meeting as our remote learning transition thrust many of our services into a spiral and left some students in need. Caf Con Leche, created prior to the pandemic, maintained its ties with students and became even more central in supporting students during this time of crisis.

Campus-wide Transformation

Since our University President charged the HSI task force with its work, several changes have contributed to our overall transformation. The hiring of our first Chief Diversity officer and the establishment of the Center for Diversity and Inclusion, the Black Cultural Center, and the soon to be center currently referred to as the Center for Latinidad, each marked important steps in establishing the kind of structural and institutional support needed to continue improving ourselves. These steps along with the recommendations of our task forces marked the beginning of our ongoing transformationone that is defined by our desire to move beyond simply enrolling Hispanic students and becoming a Hispanic Serving Institution.

David Fuentes is an associate professor in the Department of Teacher Education: Prek-12 at William Paterson University.

Francisco Daz is associate vice president of Campus Life and Co-Coordinator of Caf con Leche at William Paterson University.

Maribel Rodriguez is associate director of Campus Activities and Co-Coordinator of Caf con Leche at William Paterson University.

Elena Sabogal is an associate professor in the Department of Community & Social Justice Studies at William Paterson University.

Daisy Rodriguez is associate director of the Counseling Health & Wellness Center at William Paterson University

Johanna Torres is the director of Enrollment Services at William Paterson University.

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Moving Beyond Hispanic Enrolling While Becoming Hispanic Serving at William Paterson University - Diverse: Issues in Higher Education