UIUC News Roundup

Campus news this week included updates on changes to hiring background checks, using wearable technology to study local gun violence issues, information on implementing restorative justice programs (which could inform those concerned with the Urbana schools issue), and grant money for a smoke free campus.

UI's expanded background-check program nets fewer job withdrawals...
Results from the third year of the UI's expanded background-checks policy were shared with trustees last week.

The UI has conducted background checks for years for sensitive positions where employees handle money, work at a hospital or deal with young children.

The expanded policy approved by the board in 2015 — after strong opposition from faculty, who feared it would be discriminatory — covered all new employees for the first time.
The background checks are done only after a job offer has been made and accepted, not for every applicant...

One concern in 2015 was that the additional background checks might slow down the hiring process, but Painter said that hasn't happened. The average turnaround time for a check rose slightly in 2018 but was still 2.8 days in Urbana and Chicago and 4.6 days in Springfield. It varies depending on an applicant's history, she said, and the federal government shutdown this winter caused some short delays.

Critics had also worried that the new policy would deter people from applying to the UI. The number of applicants dipped slightly the first year background checks were in use, from 83,426 in 2015 to 81,751 in 2016. But they've rebounded since, to 101,578 in 2018.

More information is available at the full article, including more details about increased cost and numerical breakdowns of applicants screened at the various campuses.

WILL highlighted a recent University collaborative study using wearable technology to measure the effects of exposure to gun violence:

How Wearable Technology Can Help Unveil Links Between Exposure To Gun Violence & HealthResearch has shown that people who are exposed to gun violence are at greater risk of physical and mental health issues. University of Illinois researchers are looking at the role wearable technology can play in better understanding the link.

Sociologist Ruby Mendenhall is an assistant dean for the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and faculty fellow with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. She’s been working with research programmers there to carry out a mobile health study...

Twelve black women who live in a high-crime neighborhood on Chicago’s south side worked with researchers as “citizen scientists,” Mendenhall said. They wore biosensors, used their cell phones as GPS tracking devices and kept a journal to track their experiences over the course of a month...

Mendenhall said that first "Chicago Stress Study" was preliminary – and the findings were presented at an exhibit last fall, as part of the Pygmalion Festival in Champaign.

Full article here. Another professor talked about restorative justice and issues facing those attempting to implement it here and elsewhere in an interview with WILL:

U Of I Professor: Restorative Justice In Schools Requires Buy-In From CommunitySchools in Illinois and across the country are turning to restorative justice practices as an alternative to traditional discipline models. Mikhail Lyubansky, an associate professor of pyschology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, studies restorative justice, and he's written about some of the criticisms of the way it's used in schools.

While more schools are implementing restorative justice programs, Lyubansky says the educational community is still in the experimental phase — meaning schools don’t yet have a model to turn to that spells out what restorative justice should look like in an educational context...

So one of the core values is that restorative justice is voluntary. The more voluntary the participation, the more restorative the outcomes. Does everybody have access and do young people want to make use of this system? And then if we can see that there are some subgroups in a school, let's say students of color, who either almost never activate the system or refuse to participate in the system consistently, then it's feedback to us that there's something in the system that isn't working for that group. And we'd want to include them and figure out how to tweak it a way that it will work. 

Excerpts and link to the audio interview available here. Link to some of the recent Urbana High School Violence with a bit more background on local efforts to implement restorative justice programs here.

And today there was a short blurb about a grant to help the UIUC campus go 100% tobacco product free:

Grant’s goal smoke-free UIThe University of Illinois has been granted $20,000 through the CVS Health Foundation to help support plans to make the campus 100 percent free of all smoking and tobacco products later this year.

The money, delivered in partnership with the American Cancer Society and the Truth Initiative, is part of a $1.4 million grant pool going to 82 schools to help accelerate and expand the number of campuses across the U.S. that prohibit smoking, e-cigarettes and all tobacco use.

The UI’s local campus is set to become 100 percent free of all smoking and tobacco use in August with a policy applying to everyone — including students, faculty and visitors — and it will include both an indoor and outdoor ban on all forms of tobacco and vaping devices.

That’s an expansion of the UI’s first smoke-free policy launched in 2014, which bans all smoke-producing tobacco products on campus.

Full blurb available here from the News-Gazette's eEdition for those with a digital subscription.