NIU’s College of Education is the sponsor of the annual Children’s Literature Conference, which each spring attracts hundreds of teachers, school librarians and public librarians to campus. The 2008 conference focused on connecting boys with books.
With $13 million in grants from DCFS, the NIU Center for Child Welfare and Education is working to keep abused and neglected children from falling through the cracks at school.
NIU is home to the Rural Health Careers Camp, which began in 2005. Each June, the camp brings dozens of high school students from small towns across northern Illinois to campus to glimpse jobs in health care in the hopes they will pursue those avenues and return home to live and work.
NIU’s School of Nursing admitted 120 students in August 2007. Forty of the fall’s 50 additional students came thanks to a $450,680 grant from the Illinois Board of Higher Education. A new cohort of 40 students will gain admission every two years in a program housed at Aurora’s Provena Mercy Medical Center and Elgin’s Provena Saint Joseph Hospital. The other 10 are able to enroll based on the generosity of Rockford’s SwedishAmerican Hospital and the Freeport Health Network, which together are providing clinical experience sites and the salary for a master’s degree-prepared nurse who will serve as clinical instructor.
The NIU Family Health, Wellness and Literacy Center along DeKalb’s “health corridor” in the former Monsanto building, will serve children and families from DeKalb County and beyond while strengthening supervised experiential learning opportunities for NIU students in each of the three academic programs.
NIU’s Speech and Hearing Clinic treats more than 3,500 people each year with innovative assessments and treatment for a wide array of speech, language, reading, and hearing problems.
NIU’s Department of Communicative Disorders tests the hearing of an average of 900 newborn babies a year at Kishwaukee Community Hospital.
The NIU Rapid Optimization of Commercial Knowledge Program (NIU-ROCK) is helping to revitalize the Rockford economy by assisting companies in the development of new manufacturing technologies for use in the creation of next-generation military vehicles. The program has received more than $11 million in federal funding.
NIU is creating an ultra-fast, fiber-optic communications network that will bring next-generation technology to the northern Illinois region. Dubbed “NIUNet,” the roughly 175-mile fiber optic loop is expected to be a huge boon to research and economic development efforts. The network also could advance state-of-the-art health care technology, benefit area schools and help keep sought-after high tech jobs from leaving the region for more “connected” communities on either coast.
NIU is home to the Interactive Illinois Report Card, a Web-based tool NIU created and maintains that helps teachers, school districts and parents make sense of mountains of materials on student performance. The IIRC helps schools identify problems earlier, and helps families understand how their schools stack up against others in the state.
NIU is stepping up efforts to boost the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills and interests of students in the region, even before they reach college age. During the past six years, NIU Outreach has worked with the physics department and College of Liberal Arts and Sciences External Programs to provide energetic and popular science outreach programs to young students in the region. NIU Outreach will now manage the new STEM Outreach program, consolidating and expanding existing efforts. Those efforts have included traveling science demonstrations, summer science camps for high school and middle school students and a summer camp for female students designed to encourage career paths in engineering.
The Department of Geography’s Cartography Lab produces the Illinois Bicycle Map series (9 maps) for the Illinois Department of Transportation. More than 800,000 bicycle maps have been distributed by IDOT to outdoor enthusiasts and tourists over the past decade.
Graduate students in the NIU Department of Communicative Disorders wrote a successful grant proposal to save an old Works Progress Administration-commissioned canvas that hangs above the DeKalb Public Library’s fireplace. A $5,000 challenge grant was awarded to pay for restoration of the mural.
Literacy Education students from NIU are helping English language learners to achieve literacy in English and to have a good feeling about their native language. NIU’s program currently serves 107 kindergarten through third-grade students at the public Littlejohn and Cheeseboro elementary schools and the private St. Mary School in DeKalb and Archbishop Romero Catholic School in Aurora.
