SPEA Assistant Professor Cullen Merritt Earns IU Trustees' Teaching Award

SPEA’s Cullen Merritt Receives Trustees’ Teaching Award

Posted on June 11, 2018 by Leslie Wells

SPEA assistant professor Cullen Merritt’s devotion to teaching began when he was just a child.

“My teachers would let me take extra assignments home,” he recalls. “I would make my little brother do them and then grade his work for fun. When my brother realized he didn’t have to do the assignments, he refused. I was so upset because I thought he didn’t want to learn.”

Despite his early commitment to educating others, Merritt’s sights were set on a law degree. Yet as he pursued that plan, he says his love for teaching began to resurface.

“If you reflect back and identify what you were interested in as a child, that’s perhaps what you should be doing,” he says.

(more…)

RFK’s Assassination: “We Lost a Chance”

Posted on June 4, 2018 by Leslie Wells

Robert Kennedy talking to young boy in the street. — *Robert F. Kennedy speaks with a young boy in Brooklyn.*

To understand SPEA Senior Lecturer Bill Foley’s commitment to combating poverty, look no further than a thick black book that sits in his office. It’s a 600-page dissertation he wrote on urban affairs, including the War on Poverty.

Bill Foley stands in IUPUI tunnel — *SPEA Senior Lecturer Bill Foley worked as a volunteer on Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign staff.*

“I didn’t mean to write quite this much,” he laughs. “It made sense at the time.”

Foley didn’t just write about poverty. He actively worked to support those trying to end it, including volunteering as part of Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968.

“The Kennedys wanted to do something about poverty,” he says. “They had an idea to bring jobs to those who needed them directly into the inner-city and did so with successful demonstration projects.”

Ideas like those inspired a nation, including Foley and his wife, Mairin. Yet their hope would be dealt an abrupt blow on June 6, 1968.

“We believed, as did Kennedy, that there were solutions that could easily end the disproportionate relationship between urban spending and urban poverty,” Foley says. “Sadly, America never got a chance to find out.”

(more…)

Keeping Hoosiers Safe on Indiana’s Roads

Posted on May 28, 2018 by Leslie Wells

By Rich Schneider & Leslie Wells

AAA estimates 36.6 million people will hit the road this Memorial Day weekend, a 4.7 percent increase from last year. With more people driving to their destinations, Indiana State Police and many local departments will also increase their patrols to keep Hoosiers safe.

Many of those troopers and officers will be working to ensure drivers and passengers alike are buckled up and staying safe on the roads. In 2016, 46,885 people in passenger vehicles in Indiana were hurt or killed in traffic collisions; 12 percent of them were not properly restrained.

Those numbers represent a fraction of the information analyzed by the IU Public Policy Institute for its ongoing traffic safety study. Dona Sapp, PPI’s principal investigator on the project, has spent more than a dozen years evaluating the many contributing factors to the more than 200,000 traffic crashes that occur annually in Indiana.

(more…)

Supporting Experienced Leaders in Indiana’s Healthcare Industry

Posted on May 21, 2018 by Leslie Wells

Melusine Mitchell and Kimberly Inscho participate in Executive Education's Healthcare Innovation Leadership Institute. Two women siting next to each other at a table participating in a discussion. — Melusine Mitchell and Kimberly Inscho participate in Executive Education’s Healthcare Innovation Leadership Institute.

In an ever-changing field, leaders in the healthcare industry must be intentional about keeping their companies and themselves ahead of the curve. For many, that often means seeking out professional development opportunities.

“I was interested in that next level of leadership,” says Kim Inscho, vice president of human resources and marketing for Margaret Mary Health, based in Batesville.

It was a request Sara Johnson, director of SPEA’s Executive Education program, and her team had heard from healthcare organizations around the state. As they dove further into the discussion, they discovered a critical gap in supporting senior leaders, like Inscho.

(more…)

Drug Overdose Deaths Continue to Rise in Marion County

Posted on May 17, 2018 by Brad Ray

The opioid epidemic continues to claim more than 115 lives per day across the United States. As researchers studying this epidemic, we feel it is important to update the residents in our community about the prevalence of opioid-related deaths here in Marion County.

In partnership with the Marion County Coroner’s Office — and using our previously documented methodology, which looks at the detection of substances among accidental drug overdose deaths — we identified 403 accidental drug overdose cases in Marion County in 2017. The number of drug overdose deaths has nearly quadrupled since 2010 and there was a 17 percent increase from last year. You can access the data yourself here: https://dataworks.iupui.edu/handle/11243/22.

(more…)