Here is the May/June issue of the Parenting Connection newsletter. If you would like to contribute an article on your program for the July/August issue, send it to jerrybednarowski@new.rr.com by July 1.
Forum: Parenting

Here is the March/April issue of the Parenting Connection newsletter.
Forum: Parenting

Offender Reentry: Barriers and Solutions Community Action Consulting and Fair Shake have announced a series of workshops to be held throughout Wisconsin. The workshops are designed to give you the tools you need to help ex-offenders make a successful transition into the community from jail or prison. The workshop will be presented by Steven Pierce, owner of Community Action Consulting, LLC.
Forum: Transition / Re-Entry

2012: A Year of Growth for Fair Shake Thanks to all of you who shared ideas, thoughts and suggestions, in 2012 we redesigned our website to address your valuable comments. Many new pages have been added and we’ve made terrific updates to existing pages. The process is ongoing, so we hope you will continue to let us know what you think. Also in 2012, we were given our first opportunities
Forum: Transition / Re-Entry

LTC’s Incarcerated Project Offers Diverse Goals for a Diverse Population Sheboygan County, like other counties in Wisconsin, needs to address literacy of all kinds – reading, mathematics, written and oral communications, computer skills, and, yes, financial, family, health, and civics literacy. Over the last two decades, the average number of inmates participating in Lakeshore Technical C
Forum: Jails

Teacher of the Year Expands Educational Offerings for County Jail Students Teaching for 26 years in a variety of settings has shown Willa MacKenzie, “You can always learn no matter what your predicament is in life.” For the past six years, Willa has been employed by Western Technical College (Wisconsin) as an Adult Basic Education/ GED/ HSED instructor at the LaCrosse County Jail where sh
Forum: Jails

Here is the January/February issue of the Parenting Connection newsletter. If you would like to contribute an article on your program for the March/April issue, send it to jerrybednarowski@new.rr.com by February 21.
Forum: Parenting

Recent Events Mark a High Point in National Support of Correctional Education In December, Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan hosted his monthly meeting with students by inviting students at Maryland’s Montgomery County Pre-Release Center to come to his office. Since the students are minimum security, they were able to take the DC Metro “out of state” for the visit. Dr. Stefan LoBuglio,
Forum: Legislative

Join the GED 2002 Series Closeout Campaign The current version of the GED test is expiring at the end of 2013. Students’ scores will expire too, if they don’t finish and pass all five tests by then. Encourage your students to act now so they won’t have to re-take the parts of the GED test they’ve already passed. Wisconsin has more than 43,000 adults who started taking the 2002 Serie
Forum: Literacy & Academics

CEA-Wisconsin Training Day To Launch “Official” GED 2014 In 2013, the CEA-Wisconsin Training Day will expand to two days to accommodate preparation for the launch of the new computer-based GED 2014 test. The 2013 CEA-Wisconsin Training Day is scheduled for May 6-7 at the beautiful Madison Concourse Hotel and Governor’s Club. Day One of the two-day training event will include a wide v
Forum: Literacy & Academics

Fair Shake Has Tips for Reentry Instructors Educators who instruct reentry programs may be interested in two items that appeared In the October 23, 2012 issue of Fair Shake’s E-news. E-news reported that the American Bar Association and the National Institute of Justice have joined forces and released an interactive map showing the federal and state collateral consequences that await a perso
Forum: Transition / Re-Entry

Here is the November/December issue of the Parenting Connection newsletter. If you would like to contribute an article on your program for the January/February issue, send it to jerrybednarowski@new.rr.com by December 21.
Forum: Parenting

Preparation Is Key to Read-to-Me Program The Read-to-Me program at Fox Lake Correctional Institution (Wisconsin) invites men to: “Develop and maintain important emotional connections with their children and family during incarceration.” Chaplain Deborah Mejchar claims the Read-to-Me program also helps offenders to: •Assume an aspect of the parenting role while incarcerated by reading
Forum: Literacy & Academics

Motheread/Fatheread Helps Incarcerated Parents Connect with their Children Motheread, Inc. is a nationally acclaimed, private, nonprofit organization that combines the teaching of literacy skills with child development, adult empowerment and professional skill development. Adults and children learn to use the power of language to discover more about themselves, their families, and their commun
Forum: Literacy & Academics

Study Examines Mentoring Programs for Children with Incarcerated Parents With more than 1.7 million children having a parent who is incarcerated in a state or federal prison and evidence that they are at risk for developing behavior and school problems, attention has been turned to formalized mentoring programs that match at-risk youth with adult volunteers as an intervention effort to address
Forum: Research, Evaluation & Training

Recidivism Rate Shows Steady Decline Last month, Wisconsin DOC Secretary Gary H. Hamblin released the first in a series of performance measurement reports on Department recidivism rates, produced by the Department’s cross-divisional Research and Policy Unit staff. Secretary Hamblin said, “This report, Recidivism after Release from Prison, sets the foundation for a consistent and defensible
Forum: Research, Evaluation & Training

FVTC Provides Education Services at Waushara County Jail Waushara County Jail (Wisconsin) is one of Fox Valley Technical College’s jail sites. FVTC provides Adult Basic Education (ABE) classes in the Outagamie, Winnebago, Waupaca and Waushara county jails. Waushara County Jail is located in rural Wautoma. ABE classes are held at the jail for a total of 5 hours per week. Up until last yea
Forum: Jails

Here is the September/October issue of the Parenting Connection newsletter. If you would like to contribute an article on your program for the November/December issue, send it to jerrybednarowski@new.rr.com by November 1.
Forum: Parenting

WiderNet Takes Fair Shake into Prisons At the 67th Annual International Correctional Education Association Conference in St. Paul, Sue Kastensen, founder and director of the non-profit organization Fair Shake, presented a workshop on Fair Shake’s innovative web-based reentry tools. Heather Erwin, Prison Education Project Coordinator for the WiderNet Project, presented her workshop on Correct
Forum: Transition / Re-Entry

Marinette County Jail Education Program Reaches Milestone In just five short years, the Marinette (Wisconsin) County Jail has reached the 100 GED graduate milestone. On July 23rd, 2012, Hailee Doucette became the one hundredth inmate at the Marinette County Jail to earn a GED certificate through the Northeast Wisconsin Technical College (NWTC) program doing so in grand fashion – scoring
Forum: Jails

Wisconsin Correctional Testing Centers among Top Ten in GED Testing Volume For more than five decades, the American Council on Education (ACE) has annually tracked GED testing in its GED Testing Program Statistical Report and earlier similar statistical summaries. However, reliable numbers on GED testing of incarcerated individuals were lacking, The ACE research summary, GED Testing in Corr
Forum: Literacy & Academics

Here is the July/August issue of the Parenting Connection newsletter. If you would like to contribute an article on your program for the September/October issue, send it to jerrybednarowski@new.rr.com by September 1.
Forum: Parenting

Here is the May/June issue of the Parenting Connection newsletter.
Forum: Parenting

MUM Supports Kids of Incarcerated Moms As Pilgrim United Church of Christ was preparing to close their doors as a congregation in 1971, they imagined a community presence that would continue to minister to the near east side of Madison, Wisconsin. Out of this venture came Madison-area Urban Ministry which was formed in 1971 and incorporated as a non-profit agency in 1973 and the Wil-Mar Neighb
Forum: Female Offenders

Parenting Inside Out Demonstrates Impact The mission of the Children's Justice Alliance, a program of Pathfinders of Oregon, is to improve outcomes for children whose parents are involved in the criminal justice system. One of the means the Children's Justice Alliance uses to accomplish its mission is the Parenting Inside Out curriculum designed specifically for criminal justice-involved paren
Forum: Research, Evaluation & Training

Fair Shake Expands Its Website Since its founding in 2008, Fair Shake’s innovative website has focused on successful prisoner reentry. Using an interactive blend of electronic tools, reentry awareness, and community building, all stakeholders are encouraged to participate in the reintegration of recently released offenders into society. In Fair Shake’s most recent newsletter, Website Ad
Forum: Transition / Re-Entry

Guide Helps Offenders Transition Because the Wisconsin Resource Center (WRC) treats individuals with severe and persistent mental health needs, when they are released to the community, their dependence on resources for support is often great. As a special education teacher working at WRC, Nikki Cerney found that the students under 22 that required IEPs often were being released to homes that w
Forum: Transition / Re-Entry

First Book: Books for Children in Poverty It was several years ago that I started my master’s thesis in reading research when I came onto one of the most startling statistics in my teaching career: children in poverty have twenty-five books to be read to them by the time they reach kindergarten, while the affluent children have well over a thousand. I couldn’t help wanting to make a differ
Forum: Literacy & Academics

Wisconsin Book Sharing Projects Continue to Expand Over the past 20+ years, the technology has changed, but the mission remains the same. Begun in 1989 at the Wisconsin Resource Center with incarcerated parents reading children’s books into cassette recorders and sending the books and tapes home to their children, parent-child book sharing projects have evolved to using videotapes, CDs, a
Forum: Literacy & Academics

Here is the May/June issue of the Parenting Connection newsletter. If you would like to contribute an article on your program for the July/August issue, send it to jerrybednarowski@new.rr.com by July 1.
Forum: Parenting