A former Triton High School teacher pleaded guilty Thursday in relation to a sex-with-students scandal at the school in Camden County, N.J.

Former Triton High School Nick Martinelli, 28, of Cherry Hill, pleaded guilty Thursday to a fourth-degree count of hindering apprehension. In court he admitted to impeding the progress of investigators looking into an improper relationship he later admitted to having with a Triton student, according to a press release from Camden County Prosecutor's Office spokesman Jason Laughlin.

As part of his plea Martinelli isn't allowed to have contact with the former student and must forfeit his teaching certificate. He will receive a year of probation when he is sentenced on April 12, according to Laughlin.

Two other former teachers, Jeff Logandro, 32, of Blackwood, N.J. and Daniel Michielli, 27, also of Blackwood, both pleaded guilty in February to third-degree conspiracy to commit official misconduct after they carried on improper physical relationships with students that they held authority over, Camden County Prosecutor Warren Faulk announced in a press release at the time.

Both Logandro and Michielli will be sentenced Friday, prosecutors said.

Former Triton principal Catherine DePaul, 55, of Woodbury also pleaded guilty in February to a disorderly person charge of failure to report a crime, after she didn't report the teachers' alleged abuses to law enforcement, prosecutors said.

"It's obvious there existed a culture at Triton High School whereby teachers thought they could get away with improper relationships with their students and administrators turned a blind eye," Faulk said after the educators were arrested last year.

Prosecutors say that in April 2012 that a Triton student alerted a substitute teacher that teachers were having sex with students. In turn, that teacher told DePaul but prosecutors say that the principal failed to report the allegations to law enforcement.

As part of her plea, DePaul agreed to forfeit her job, never hold a public job in New Jersey again and serve one year of probation, prosecutors said.

The school’s vice principal, Jernee Kollock, still face charges.

A 7-year-old boy Baltimore boy was suspended from school after his teacher complained that the boy chewed a breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun, the boy's father says.

In a note that was sent to parents Friday, Park Elementary School officials told parents only that "a student used food to make an inappropriate gesture," WBFF-TV of Baltimore reported.

The boy, Josh Welch, a second-grader, told the station he was actually trying to shape a mountain, "but it didn't look like a mountain really, and it turned out to be a gun, kinda." 

Josh's father, B.J. Welch, called Josh's two-day suspension "insanity."

"With all the potential issues that could be dealt with at school —  real threats, bullies, whatever — the real issue is, it's a pastry," he told WBFF. "You know?" 

Educators have been extra sensitive to representations of weapons in the wake of the mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in which 20 children and six educators were killed.

In January, a 5-year-old girl was suspended for making a "terroristic threat" at a kindergarten in the Mount Carmel Area, Pa., School District for saying she was going to shoot classmates and herself with her pink "Hello Kitty" bubble gun.

NBC Philadelphia: Kindergartner suspended for pink bubble gun threat

"This is a good-natured little girl," said Robin Ficker, an attorney for the girl, who hasn't been identified because of privacy laws. "And this shows how hysterical people who work at schools have become since Sandy Hook."

Watch US News videos on NBCNews.com

Follow M. Alex Johnson on Twitter and Facebook.

Stephen Smith / American Public Media

Jennifer Larsen guides her third-grade class through a story-telling exercise at Edison Elementary School in Long Beach, Calif. She's one of three teachers at the school who coach other teachers on teaching writing.

Jandella Faulkner crouches beside a table of busy third-graders in Jennifer Larsen’s class at Edison Elementary School. The students have pencils in hand, outlines spread around them, and a story about penguins and otters in progress.

Faulkner stands to call across the room: “Loving how this group is already talking, Ms. Larsen.”  Then she swoops down on another table of young authors.

Jandella Faulkner is a teaching coach in the Long Beach, Calif., school district. Her job is to train a select group of teachers at Edison Elementary, including Jennifer Larsen, in a new literacy curriculum called Write From The Beginning.  It’s part of a district-wide training system that relies on teachers working with each other to improve classroom practices. So, with Faulkner’s help, Larsen and the other site coaches at Edison train their colleagues at the school how to use Write From The Beginning in their own classrooms.

Many American school districts rely heavily on outside experts, professional conferences and traveling consultants to conduct on-the-job training (also known as professional development). New York City, the nation’s largest school district, spent about $100 million last year on professional development consultants. In most cases, there’s little evidence to show whether the outside groups are helping schools improve, says Pamela Grossman, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.

“There is a lot of money spent on professional development that does not really support teachers in learning how to improve,” Grossman says.

Long Beach creates its own training teams. For years, the Long Beach Unified School District has had one of the nation's best-regarded professional development programs for new and veteran teachers, according to Stephanie Hirsh, executive director of Learning Forward, a national nonprofit organization focused on teacher education.

“Our system is really invested in building internal capacity,” says Jill Baker, the district’s assistant superintendent for elementary and K-8, and chief academic officer. “What that means is teachers become leaders and trainers. We’re not bringing someone in from the outside. We’re teaching teachers within to go back to their school sites to train others.”

'Ahead of the curve'
Professional development is seen as a critical component of many education reform initiatives. National studies show that good training programs are especially important in high-poverty districts like Long Beach, according to Learning Forward. With some 84,000 students, Long Beach is California’s third-largest district. Most of the students are from families of color. Some 70 percent qualify for free or reduced lunch, an indication that families live at or below the poverty level.

Education experts say that good, independent research on what constitutes professional development for teachers is relatively scarce. Even so, more than $1 billion is spent on teachers’ on-the-job training each year in the United States, according to an analysis of data collected by the U.S. Department of Education.

The Long Beach district is “ahead of the curve,” Pamela Grossman says. “Professional development that’s embedded in teaching and embedded in practice is likely to have more impact on what teachers do,” Grossman says. “A model where coaches are familiar with the schools, the districts and the curriculum ― and are therefore able to offer fairly tailored coaching ― has a better chance of moving practice along.”

Long Beach administrators credit the Write From The Beginning curriculum ― and the teacher training that accompanies it ― with turning around dismal test scores at many of the participating schools. District figures show that schools scoring at or below 20 percent proficiency in state writing tests have boosted their numbers above 50 percent since 2007. Some once-struggling schools have posted writing test results above 80 percent.

Long Beach administrators say there have been no independent, peer-reviewed studies of its professional development program. But the district has been a winner, and a five-time finalist, of the prestigious Broad Prize, given by the California-based Broad Foundation to recognize urban school districts that improve student academic performance and narrow achievement gaps between poor and more affluent students. The Broad Foundation cited the district’s professional development program as an essential element in Long Beach’s ability to outperform other high-poverty school districts in student achievement.  (Disclaimer: the Broad Foundation is among the funders of The Hechinger Report.)

Stephen Smith / American Public Media

Third graders at Signal Hill Elementary work on a writing assignment.

Writing 'so difficult to teach'
At Signal Hill Elementary, another Long Beach school, Principal Lauren Price points out that elementary school teachers must master a range of subjects, while middle and high school teachers specialize in single subject areas. Professional development is “essential” to keep teachers up to speed, she says. “Every year, researchers are learning more about the way kids learn and grow and develop,” Price says. “There are new and different ways to do things.”

The principal at Edison Elementary enlisted Jennifer Larsen and her colleagues, Kevin Quinn and Ruby Gaytan, to be the Edison site coaches for writing. They’re veteran teachers; all have been in the classroom 15 years or more. Each member gets 48 hours of training in the curriculum, starting with a summer workshop. Faulkner visits their classrooms about once a month. The Write From The Beginning curriculum was developed by Thinking Maps, a North Carolina education company.

“Writing was something that had been neglected for so many years because it was so difficult to teach,” Larsen says. “I saw this as something the kids really need.” Long Beach writing teachers are being trained to use graphical organizers ― the so-called “thinking maps” ― to help students organize their thoughts, describe characters, marshal evidence, come up with key words and plot other writing elements.

Fourth-grade teacher Ruby Gaytan points to a thinking map projected on her classroom wall with a list of qualities that describe Ivan, a character her students are writing about.  He wants to sell salt but is thwarted by a greedy king.  How to describe Ivan?  

“Broke, no money!” one student calls out.

“Determined!” another declares.

Gaytan directs her students to use their freshly minted list of adjectives in Ivan’s story of struggle. “If you can think it ...,” Gaytan prompts.

“You can say it,” the class responds in unison.

Gaytan says the off-hours training she gets with the writing curriculum keeps her fresh in the classroom. “The majority of teachers love to learn, that’s why we teach. It keeps me motivated,” Gaytan says.

Eye on Common Core standards
Kevin Quinn, also a fourth-grade teacher, says the training will help teachers stay “ahead of the game,” as Common Core State Standards are adopted by California schools in 2014.  The Common Core curriculum puts a heavy emphasis on student achievement in writing.

Larsen says the curriculum and the coaching have made her both a better writer, and a better writing teacher.  “I’m more aware when I’m reading aloud to the kids of all the great descriptions and the vivid language in every text,” Larsen says. “When I model writing for them, I express myself better.”

Coaches and teachers get paid for the time they spend on professional development, but Quinn and others describe it as “minimal compensation.” Meanwhile, the budget woes and accompanying teacher layoffs of recent years mean that Larsen, Gaytan and Quinn face classrooms of 30 children every day instead of 20.

“Whereas the majority of our staff wants to participate in the professional development, there is a lot of burnout,” Quinn says. “My workload has increased, my accountability has increased, but my discretionary time has not increased. So it becomes very difficult.”

Lisa Worsham, the head of English curriculum for K-5 schools in Long Beach, acknowledges that teachers are under stress. But she says professional development can help overcome the sense of isolation a busy teacher can feel. “There are a lot of us in the building, but we show up for work, we close our door, we teach all day, we’re exhausted, we leave the classroom and go home,” Worsham says. Without signing up for training, “there’s not a lot of opportunity to sit down with five other teachers and collaborate,” she says.

In addition to the in-class training, local site coaches meet four times a year with Jandella Faulkner at the district’s training center. Faulkner’s classroom is stocked with flip charts, baskets of colorful markers and a small mountain of sticky notes ― the raw materials of professional development workshops. A tall and magnetic figure, Faulkner encourages a group of nine site coaches to swap stories about what is working ― and what’s floundering ― back in their respective schools.

Faulkner holds up a training notebook. “When do you have the time to open up this binder and say, ‘what does my site need?’ This is your time to do it,” she declares.

Coaches as politicians
Coaching one’s colleagues can be a politically tricky enterprise. “It’s about having a rapport, really forming a relationship with each individual teacher,” says Jeff Lamperts of Willard Elementary.

Cheryl Hubert of Starr King Elementary, another site coach, says being a teacher in the local trenches gives her more credibility with her peers than some outside consultant who parachutes in. “They know who I am,” Hubert says. “They feel more comfortable with me than someone from a business [where they] think, what are they selling?”

Faulkner says many Long Beach teachers are eager to take up the new writing techniques that she’s helping to spread across the district. But not all. “We have teachers at the end of their careers say, ‘I’m not trying anything new.’ And convincing them to try something is a huge challenge,” Faulkner says.

At Lindsey Middle School, the language arts staff is using a similar literacy curriculum called Write For The Future And Beyond. The local site coaches at Lindsey get released from class nine days during a year for training. The district also sends teaching coaches to the school for in-class visits once a month or more, depending on how well the writing program takes hold, according to Stacy Casanave, a middle school literacy coach.

Lindsey teacher Shauna Hutchinson says the fat curriculum binder looked overwhelming at first. “But once you went to training they broke it down for you,” she says.

Another facet of the Long Beach professional development program is a close, long-standing relationship with the College of Education at California State University, Long Beach. School personnel help with teaching and research at Cal State. Students at Cal State do their student-teaching in Long Beach schools.

Historically, most of the district’s beginning teachers have been Cal State graduates, according to Jill Baker, the district’s assistant superintendent. The district requires newly minted teachers to go through a prescribed on-the-job training program in their first years. But California’s fiscal crisis and the Great Recession have caused the Long Beach school district to slash hundreds of millions of dollars from its budget, laying off hundreds of teachers and cutting programs. Newer teachers were the first to go. Few beginners get hired.

Long Beach spends $5.4 million a year on professional development, less than 1 percent of the district’s $691 million budget. Professional development was cut nearly in half during and after the recession. In fiscal year 2006-07, 4,546 employees attended 11,763 training sessions. In fiscal 2011-12, 1,945 employees attended 6,982 sessions. Baker says the district has focused teacher training on areas that can have the most impact on how students learn. These include writing, mathematics and school behavior programs. There is less opportunity for individual teachers to select workshops or training programs in other areas such as creative arts and social studies.

“We’ve had to take a lot of things that we liked to do in the past and really narrow it down to what your students are showing us they need,” Baker says. “Professional development for teachers, and for principals as well, has been at the core of the work that we’ve done that has garnered results. “It’s part of the district culture, and it continues to work over time.”

This story was reported by Stephen Smith of American RadioWorks, in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, a non-profit, foundation-funded education news site based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

More from The Hechinger Report

• For first time, a 'parent trigger' without a hitch
• Charter school battles continue in New Jersey
• State of the Union features historic focus on early education

WTHR

Diana Medley, a special-education teacher at a different school, said Sunday, Feb. 10, that allowing gay and lesbian students to attend the prom at Sullivan High School is "offensive to us."

Students and the principal at an Indiana high school are disavowing a campaign by parents to organize a "gay-free" prom.

Even the pastor of the church that hosted the original organizing meeting says the church doesn't back the effort to throw a straights-only prom for students at Sullivan High School in Sullivan, Ind., south of Terre Haute.

The movement began after Principal David Springer was asked to clarify whether same-sex couples would be allowed to take part in the traditional grand march before the prom, which is scheduled for April 27.

"Anybody can go to the prom," Springer told NBC station WTHR of Indianapolis. "Of course, a girl could go out with another girl if they didn't have a date or that was their choice."

One of those attending the small gathering of parents Sunday night at Sullivan First Christian Church was Diana Medley, a special-education teacher at another school, North Central Junior/Senior High School, in nearby Farmersburg.

Allowing gay and lesbian students to attend the prom is "offensive to us," said Medley, who told NBC station WTWO of Terre Haute that even though she doesn't agree with them, she does care for "homosexual students" who come to her with their problems. 

Then, Medley created a firestorm of criticism by equating gay and lesbian teenagers to students with developmental disabilities.

"It's the same thing with my special-needs kids," she said. "I think God puts everyone in our lives for a reason."

Asked whether gays and lesbians have any "purpose in life," she replied:

"No, I honestly don't. Sorry, but I don't. I don't understand it."

Commentators from across the country weighed in to criticize Medley, including syndicated columnist Dan Savage, who publicized a petition to have Medley fired. 

Dale Wise, senior minister at Sullivan First Christian Church, was quick to distance himself from the sentiment.

"Our church has no involvement in this whatsoever. It's a community thing where people have met here," he told WTWO.

Jim Davis of Sullivan declared that "we shouldn't be condemning people, and that's what judgment is."

"Christ came to save the people, not to condemn them," he told WTWO. "Love them as a person. You don't have to love what they do, because the gays may not love all the mistakes you make."

Emily Butler, a junior at Sullivan High, said: "You should be able to go with whoever you want. You shouldn't be discriminated against for what you are, what you believe in."

Even Wyatt Land, a Sullivan student who said it was important to remember that "the Bible says for a man to love another woman," told WTHR that he thought gay and lesbian classmates should be welcome at the official prom.

"As long as they aren't sitting there and kissing on the dance floor and grinding on each other, stuff like that, I don't have a problem with that," he said. "I don't see what's wrong with it. Prom is for everybody. It's a high school experience."

Watch the top videos on NBCNews.com

Updated at 6:33 p.m. ET: The Duke University fraternity that threw a "racist rager" party last week featuring racial stereotypes of Asians has been suspended by its national headquarters.

The national office of Kappa Sigma said in a statement Wednesday that it was investigating last Friday's party for possible conduct unbecoming a chapter. It told its chapter in Durham, N.C., to shut down all activities pending completion of the investigation and a decision on punishment.

In a message to Kappa Sigma members nationwide, Christian Nascimento, the fraternity's "worthy grand master," wrote Thursday:

The Kappa Sigma Fraternity is a diverse group of men, with members from all walks of life. We celebrate this diversity, as it is one of the things that makes our Order so strong. The actions taken in association with the event in question are inconsistent with our values. I personally condemn that type of behavior.

An estimated 250 to 300 people gathered on campus Wednesday to protest the party, which was promoted through fliers and email messages that included stereotyped Asian spellings like "herro" and "peopre" and cartoonish images of the late North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il. It was promoted on Twitter with the hashtag #RacistRager.

Katherine Zhang, a senior and co-president of Duke's Asian American Alliance, read a statement at the rally declaring, "When you wrote, 'Herro Duke,' you were not just mocking an accent. You were mocking an immigrant's struggle to make it in this nation."

The fraternity declined NBC News' request for comment, but at a campus forum Wednesday night, its president, Luke Keohane, said, "Our actions were inexcusable," according to a report in the campus paper, The Chronicle.

"We're not here because we want to defend ourselves," he said. "We're here because we want to learn."

It's not the first time the Duke chapter has been in trouble. It returned to campus only last year after having been dissolved in 2002 amid a misconduct investigation.

While the national fraternity has already suspended the Duke chapter, the university itself is holding off on any action.

"At the moment, we're not aware of any overt violations," Larry Moneta, Duke's vice president for student affairs, told NBC News. "Acting boorish and foolish is not in and of itself a violation."

Follow M. Alex Johnson on Twitter and Facebook.

Watch the top videos on NBCNews.com

Published 11:37 a.m. ET: Students with concealed handgun licenses could soon carry guns on Texas college campuses.

More than a dozen state senators have signed on to Senate Bill 182, also known as the  “Campus Personal Protection Act."

The bill's primary author, Senator Brian Birdwell, said the bill is about preserving the 2nd Amendment.

“This affords CHL holders, one of the most lawful group of citizens in our state, to be able exercise that 2nd amendment right to go on to the campus of higher learning to be able defend themselves and protect their right to self-preservation, God forbid, some act of evil be perpetrated,” Birdwell said.

If passed, the bill would allow CHL holders to bring concealed weapons onto public universities. Private universities could choose to go gun-free.

“It does respect the private property rights of the private institutions, and they have the opportunities to opt-out of the requirements," Birdwell said. "So we do want to respect the private institutions private property rights."

The bill also gives some say to universities on where students can and cannot bring their concealed weapons.

“They are to establish some rules and some boundaries, sporting events for example, are separated out of there, so it provides quite a bit of local control for the local universities,” said State Senator Kelly Hancock.

Hancock said the bill would not just affect students.

"And really more what you’re talking about more with a CHL on a college campus is really you’re probably addressing more professors, university employees then you are actually students," Hancock said.

Birdwell said CHL holders living on-campus at public universities would have to secure the gun, according to university set rules.

NBC 5 reached out to several DFW area universities and colleges for an opinion about the bill.

“In keeping with state law, neither the University of North Texas, as one of the state’s public institutions, nor I in my position as the university president, may take a position supporting or opposing any specific State of Texas legislation,” UNT President V. Lane Rawlings said in a statement.

TCU’s chancellor also released a statement on the bill.

“"With respect to the proposed bill, TCU's biggest priority is keeping the campus safe. We accomplish that through our 24/7 TCU Police force, which has procedures in place dedicated to the protection of all members of our community. I believe that TCU, as a private institution, should be provided with a choice as to whether we would permit someone with a concealed weapon license to carry a weapon on campus," said TCU Chancellor Victor J. Boschini Jr.

In the past, the student congress at UTA passed a resolution against CHL holders bringing concealed guns to class.

The bill has been referred to the Criminal Justice Committee.

Chris Connell / The Hechinger Report

From cable guy to nuclear technician: John Hoffmeister.

LYNCHBURG, Va. — Cable TV installer John Hoffmeister was strapped to a utility pole 30 feet in the air when his cellphone rang with the offer of a better job.

The energy company AREVA was calling to say that it would train Hoffmeister to repair nuclear reactors and at the same time send him to a community college in Lynchburg, Va., for an associate’s degree. He’d draw his full salary while spending 10 weeks a year in two compressed semesters of classes that the company helped devise.

For Hoffmeister, 37 — who had started college after high school but dropped out, and ended up installing home-security systems, delivering pizzas and even working as a cattle hand — it was a perfect second chance.

“When you find out about a program like this where you can kind of turn back the hands of time and get, essentially, a scholarship, it works out amazing,” said Hoffmeister, who received his associate’s degree four years after starting in the program. It also served AREVA by helping fill a glaring need for trained employees that many companies say the nation’s higher-education system isn’t turning out with the skills, and at the speed, they need.

The AREVA collaboration with its hometown community college is an example of an approach that has come to be called “learn and earn,” which the Obama administration and many higher education experts say the country needs to stay competitive: It offers more opportunities for working adults to earn a living, often supported by their employers, while they upgrade skills to take on specific, high-demand jobs.

Instead of just picking up stray credits and classes, older students like Hoffmeister are steered into carefully planned and structured programs that lead to degrees and certificates in particular fields in the shortest time possible.

Hospitals in Cincinnati, Ohio; Louisville, Ky., and elsewhere are providing higher-level training to prospective nurses and technicians they’ve already hired for lower-level jobs. Shipyard trainees in Newport News, Va., and newly minted jet mechanics and machinists in Seattle, too, are earning college credits while starting their careers, preparing them to advance to more sophisticated work.

Some of the biggest companies in America have joined the push to expand opportunities like this for low-income workers in dead-end jobs. Corporate Voices for Working Families, a non-profit business membership organization, has published case studies showcasing some of the best models like AREVA’s.

Business-community college partnerships like these are getting a push from a little-known, $2 billion U.S. Department of Labor initiative to improve career pathways at community colleges and address dismal graduation rates. While it sounds like common sense that everyone entering a community college would be enrolled in targeted, carefully focused programs of study, most students aren’t. They wander in, take a few credits and wander off again — a few because they land new jobs or promotions, but many because their educations were taking too much time or didn’t seem to be getting them anywhere. Meanwhile, an estimated 3.7 million jobs remain vacant because employers say they can’t find applicants with the right skills.

Only half of 62,000 students in community colleges in Washington state, for example, tracked over seven years by the Community College Research Center at Teachers College at Columbia University, passed at least three courses in a single field, and fewer than 30 percent earned certificates or degrees or transferred to four-year institutions.

But for those who found their ways into concentrated programs of study, the success rate approached 50 percent — especially if they did so right off the bat.

“All the data says the same thing: If you know where you’re going, you’re more likely to get there,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

25 percent high school drop-out rate
The Labor Department’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program is a remnant of the American Graduation Initiative, which President Barack Obama proposed early in his first term as part of efforts to regain by 2020 America’s standing as the country with the highest proportion of college-educated people.

That remains a goal. But it’s a tall order with 25 percent of teenagers dropping out of high school, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and anemic community-college graduation rates that have helped sink the United States from first to 16^th among developed countries in the proportion of its population with college and university degrees.

It’s also why policymakers, educators, employers and foundations are pushing to make community college courses more relevant to available jobs and speed up the journey to degrees and certificates.

Colleges including Central Virginia and Jefferson Community and Technical College in Louisville dovetail instruction to the needs of older, working students and the requirements of local businesses.

Related: Economic reality marries apprenticeships, college

Norton Healthcare and other hospitals in Louisville are working with Jefferson to fill their ranks of medical lab technicians and therapists’ assistants by sending them to specially designed evening classes at the college that help entry-level hospital workers advance into higher-paid, more demanding positions.

Gail Kuper, a receptionist in a Norton physicians’ practice, jumped at the opportunity and is on her way to becoming a medical assistant with an associate’s degree.

“What a mistake I made not going to college right out of high school, but I got married and had two kids. It just wasn’t in the cards at the time,” said the 43-year-old grandmother. Now she spends 15 hours in classes each week in addition to her day job.

In Cincinnati, a successful hospital-college partnership has propelled Carrie Martin from taking vital signs and administering shots in a clinic into the better-paid position of registered nurse. The Health Careers Collaborative that local hospitals launched with Cincinnati State Technical and Community College has become a national model. Cincinnati State and Jefferson are among 10 colleges that shared a $20 million U.S. Department of Labor grant last year to continue to expand pathways into high-demand medical professions.

It took Martin, who is 37, four years of evening classes, but she earned an associate’s degree and her nurse’s cap in 2010, then went on to get a bachelor’s degree the next year. Now she’s halfway through a master’s program from which she will emerge as a nurse practitioner, making $60,000 to $70,000 a year to start, all while working full time at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Community college 'boot camps'
Some learn and earn programs, like AREVA’s, pay workers’ salaries while they take classes. AREVA enrolls about 24 new technicians each year at Central Virginia, who take math, computer and general education classes while training at the company’s Lynchburg facility or going on the road to maintain or repair nuclear power plants.

Chris Connell / The Hechinger Report

The UPS Worldport is a noisy mammoth of a place, a whirligig of conveyor belts and bins. Lasers guide 1.6 million packages each night into the right bins so they can be trundled back onto the UPS fleet of 130 jets.

In Louisville, some 2,000 students at Jefferson and the University of Louisville are getting their full college tuition paid by working part-time on the midnight shift at UPS Worldport, the package delivery giant’s huge facility at the Louisville International Airport. The college students and other workers unload 130 UPS jets that converge there each evening, feed the packages onto conveyor belts that sort them into the right bins, then load them back again.

UPS was having trouble finding reliable workers for the 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. shift before it began a $1 billion expansion of Worldport in 1999. Rather than risk losing one of the city’s major employers, the state offered the company tax credits to cover half the cost of employees’ community-college tuition, and a collaboration called Metropolitan College was born.

It’s still an expensive proposition for UPS, but it has produced a dependable, highly productive and stable workforce, said Tom Volta, vice president for human resources. “People aren’t moving packages in the wrong places and sending them off to destinations unknown,” he said. The college students, added personnel manager Steve Oppel, “make the best employees because they have a lot more at stake. They don’t want to jeopardize their job.”

Since Metropolitan College’s inception 12,000 UPS workers have availed themselves of free tuition to earn 3,000 degrees and 4,000 certificates.

Utility companies in Georgia and elsewhere, worried about a looming shortage of line-workers among their aging workforce, have teamed up with community colleges to run “boot camps” that groom students for those critical jobs.

With help from an industry-sponsored organization called the Center for Energy Workforce Development, the utilities and colleges produced a curriculum for an eight-week electrical line-worker training program that combines classroom instruction about working safely with electricity with outdoor practice climbs on utility poles. Students earn 12 college credits and first crack at jobs that pay $14 to $16 an hour.

The five enthusiastic students at the boot camp last summer at Georgia Piedmont Technical College outside Atlanta included a laid-off machinist, a laid-off metalworker, a house painter, an electrician and a yard worker, ages 21 to 31. Corey Willard, the youngest, quit his last job because “I wanted more of a career than cutting people’s grass for $9 an hour.” The oldest, machinist Kenny Minish, said, “I’m a believer. I always wanted to be a lineman and this was the perfect opportunity.”

The Georgia Piedmont program “has been a godsend for us,” said Victor Hurst, vice president of line services for Snapping Shoals Electric Membership Corporation. “We were just failing too often hiring straight off the street.” And, he said, the college classes serve an additional purpose: letting the future line-workers know they need to keep learning.

“The equipment, the technology they have to work with, changes and changes fast. It’s getting hard for us to keep them abreast of the things they need to work on. They are constantly going to class,” said Hurst. “Training is part of what you’ll be doing in this business until the day you say, ‘I’m ready to retire.’”

This article, "Impatient employers step in to educate prospective workers," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University. It’s one of a series of reports about workforce development and higher education.

 More from The Hechinger Report

 As its universities turn out engineering grads, Poland attracts U.S. tech giants

New pressure on colleges to disclose grads’ earnings

WXIA / NBC via Reuters

A 14-year-old pupil and a teacher were shot Thursday, Jan. 31, at Price Middle School in Atlanta. Another student at the school was arrested.

The case of a Virginia second-grader caught with a gun on his school bus this week may be shocking but it's by no means uncommon.

Across the country, children are being suspended or arrested for having weapons on campus or buses on a daily basis.

Police in Henrico, Va., were waiting at school for the little boy Monday morning after he allegedly threatened another pupil on their ride to Ratcliffe Elementary School. They found a handgun in his backpack, NBC station WWBT of Richmond, Va. reported.

The incident made national headlines Monday, as did a similar incident when a loaded gun was found in a pupil's book bag last month at P.S. 215 in Queens, N.Y.

However, these incidents aren't as isolated as they may appear. An NBC News survey of crime dockets and news reports across all 50 states reveals that, since Jan. 1, there have been at least 48 incidents in which guns have been discovered on students, in their bags or in their lockers.

There were at least five last Thursday alone: in Atlanta; Augusta, Kan.; Chicago; Raleigh, N.C.; and Winston-Salem, N.C.

There have been 23 class days since some districts resumed school Jan. 2 — not including Jan. 21, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. That works out to more than two gun reports a day this school year. (The survey excluded incidents in which pupils were caught with toy guns; all of the weapons were handguns, rifles, BB guns or air rifles.)

And those are just the cases that have been made public: Juveniles' police records are generally protected, so an untold number of other such incidents are likely to have occurred.

While it's impossible to determine whether such potentially deadly show-and-tells are happening more frequently, the public data do indicate just how hard it is to clamp down on guns on campus since the issue became a national concern in December in the wake of the fatal shootings of 20 pupils at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Most of the time, the weapons are brought along for protection or as items of curiosity, with the pupil more interested in showing off than in shooting. And usually, they're intercepted before anyone can get hurt, with the student's being suspended or charged for a weapons violation, depending on his or her age. Often, a parent or guardian is charged with failing to secure the weapon.

But when they're not intercepted, tragedy is often the result.

Last week, a 14-year-old boy was shot and wounded by a student at Price Middle School in Atlanta, police said.

"Gun violence in and around our schools is simply unconscionable and must end," Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said. "Too many young people are being harmed and too many families are suffering from unimaginable and unnecessary grief."

And on Jan. 10, a student was wounded by a classmate who shot him at Taft Union High School in Taft, Calif., police said The boy targeted a second classmate but missed, authorities said.

While many lawmakers have introduced legislation that would put armed police or security guards in schools, that may not be the answer, according to a state task force reviewing campus safety in Virginia.

The task force last week stressed the need to fund anti-bullying programs and school resource officers, but it stopped short of calling for more officers in schools.

"If we were to put 1,000 new police officers in our schools, those police officers would have to come from somewhere, and we might inadvertently make things less safe in our communities," Dewey G. Cornell, a law professor at the University of Virginia who's a member of the task force, told WWBT.

The boy who opened fire last week in California was one of those who carried a weapon because he said he had been bullied, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said.

But that's not a good enough excuse, parents say.

"That just doesn't make sense," said Jeremy Massey, the parent of a student at Daly Elementary School in Inskter, Mich., near Detroit, where a third-grader was found to have taken a loaded gun to class two days in a row last month. The boy told police he carried the gun for his own protection.

"If you are 10 years old, the only protection you need is to go tell an adult," Massey told NBC station WDIV of Detroit.

Related:

Full list of student gun incidents this year

Obama on guns: 'We're not going to wait until the next Newtown'

Guns already allowed in schools with little restriction in many states

Watch US News crime videos on NBCNews.com

NBC News

Tyler Clementi with his mother Jane. Clementi, 18, a freshman at Rutgers, jumped off the George Washington Bridge in September, 2012.

On Monday, Rutgers University and the family of Tyler Clementi -- the freshman who committed suicide after his roommate used a webcam to film him in a romantic encounter with another man -- will announce the newly created Tyler Clementi Center at the New Jersey college, dedicated to helping students transition from home to university life. 

The ceremony at the campus will include members of Clementi's family, who started a foundation after his death focused on bullying, youth suicide and other issues related to gay students, the Star-Ledger reported.

"The Tyler Clementi Center is a collaborative effort between Rutgers University and the Tyler Clementi Foundation," Rutgers officials said in an announcement.

"The center will draw from academic disciplines across the university and throughout the nation to create new programs and approaches to address issues that confront young people — specifically youth making the transition from home to college."

Although Joseph and Jane Clementi, Tyler's parents, filed court papers shortly after their son's death in 2010 preserving their right to sue Rutgers for damages, the family chose not to file suit anyone associated with the webcam spying or the suicide, the family's attorney Paul Mainardi said in October. 

Read more about Tyler Clementi on NBCNews.com

"The Clementi family made a considered decision to not pursue civil suits," Mainardi told the Star-Ledger. "They are devoting their energies to the positive work of the Tyler Clementi Foundation."

Last year, the university and the Clementis’ newly formed foundation co-sponsored a symposium on bullying and social media on the Piscataway campus. Nearly 200 academics and school officials attended, the Star-Ledger reported.

The new Tyler Clementi Center will offer lectures, symposia and training on the misuse of social media and youth suicide, Rutgers officials said. The center will also focus on cyber bullying and the adjustment to adulthood and college life.

"The goal of the center is to provide scholarly support for the work of policymakers, social activists, community leaders and other advocates for vulnerable youth," Rutgers officials said.

Two of the university's professors will serve as directors of the center. 

John Munson / AP file

Dharun Ravi, 20, the former Rutgers University student waits before court proceedings, Friday, March 9, 2012 in New Brunswick, N.J.

Clementi, 18, jumped off the George Washington Bridge in 2010, a few weeks after he started his freshman year.

His roommate used a webcam to watch the freshman in a romantic encounter with another man in their dorm room, then boasted about what he had seen on Twitter. Clementi, who had told his parents he was gay weeks before leaving for college, filed a complaint about the spying with university officials hours before his suicide.

Clementi's roommate, Dharun Ravi, was found guilty of invasion of privacy, bias intimidation and other charges in a nationally televised trial last year. He served less than a month in county jail. 

Ravi is currently appealing his sentence. 

JACKSON, Miss. -- When state officials here tried last year to recruit a for-profit company to manage schools in rural Tate County, the community outcry was swift. Concerned residents spoke out in the media, argued their case to lawmakers and circulated a petition against the “privatization” of Tate County Schools.

Patricia Johnson, whose son attends a public high school in the county, described the proposal as “crazy.” For-profit companies, she said, shouldn’t be “getting paid” to run things when parents are having to buy copy paper for teachers in cash-strapped schools.

At first glance, Mississippi would seem an unlikely source of resistance to school privatization. But this year, a coalition of lawmakers and community groups is fighting vigorously against the prospect of for-profit companies opening up charter schools.

“I think people have been astounded that anyone can make money off of public education,” said Nancy Loome, executive director of The Parents’ Campaign, which lobbies for public education in Mississippi. “Our schools struggle to make it on the resources they are provided. If (for-profit management is) trying to make a profit and pay shareholders, they aren’t going to be investing very much in educating children.”

This fierce resistance in Mississippi is but the latest example of waning interest in for-profit school managers across the country. Charter schools of all types continue to spread rapidly. But schools managed by for-profit companies make up a smaller share than they did just a few years ago.

In Mississippi, the debate comes as lawmakers are poised to approve a major expansion of charter schools later this month. At the same time, renewed attention to the state’s lagging test scores and overall woeful performance in education is fueling debate about alternative ways of running schools.

Rick Hess, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said states should at least consider the potential benefits of for-profits. “I think it’s crazy to discriminate against companies because they want to pay taxes,” he said. “The bemoaning of for-profits is one reason we wind up with a system that has enormous difficulty trimming costs, and growth of even successful schools moves at a snail’s pace.”

Charter schools can be divided into two broad groups: ones that are freestanding and ones that are part of larger networks or chains. In 2007, about half of all network or chain charter schools were managed by for-profit companies. Just three years later, that figure had dropped to about 37 percent, according to the most recent data from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Some states, including New York, have banned for-profit companies from running charter schools. In other cases, companies such as EdisonLearning, which used to focus primarily on managing schools, have shifted away from management after struggling to turn a profit or raise enough investment capital.

The number of for-profit companies has declined modestly, and the number of schools they operate has hit a plateau, said Gary Miron, a professor of education at Western Michigan University who studies charter schools. (At the same time, some of the schools’ enrollment continues to increase, Miron said, and the number of virtual schools is exploding.)

Education leaders say there are two main reasons for the increased wariness toward for-profit operators: philosophical objections to mixing public education and profit, particularly in low-income communities, and mounting skepticism over their record in some cities and states.

“The biases are deeply ingrained, especially in low-income neighborhoods where the notion of profit-making is not welcome and there’s this sense that competition and markets have not benefited these communities,” said Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Rees said there is nothing inherently wrong with for-profit operators. She pointed to the National Heritage Academies, based in Michigan, which she said has managed to expand relatively successfully; the network now operates about 75 schools in states including Michigan, Ohio and North Carolina, according to its website. Meanwhile, a number of nonprofit operators have performed abysmally. 

“The bottom line ought to be quality,” Rees said.

Advocacy groups find a role
But in Tate County, where nearly two-thirds of public-school students live in poverty, the specter of for-profit management has been greeted mostly with skepticism.

“When you draw off funding … it can cause some great concern. It’s basically taking money we don’t have,” said Steve Hale, a Democratic state senator from the county who fielded residents’ concerns about for-profits last year. (Mississippi has only fully funded its K-12 system twice in the last decade.)

In the end, bids from management companies came in two and three times higher than what the state wanted to spend on Tate County’s schools. All were declined, and the state continues to oversee the Tate district through an appointed “conservator” -- a public employee.

But Hale’s concerns haven’t gone away, and two charter-school bills are circulating. One would allow for-profits; the other would ban them. For-profit education providers K-12 Inc., Connections Education and E2020 spent $250,000 on Mississippi lobbyists in 2011 and 2012, with more spending expected this year. That doesn’t include money from numerous advocacy groups (such as the Black Alliance for Educational Options and the Mississippi Center for Public Policy) that have a track record of promoting school choice, including vouchers and charters.

In some cases, advocacy groups are funded directly by for-profits. K-12 Inc. and E2020 contributed to Republican former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, a group that over the past year has worked to craft education policy with Mississippi lawmakers and the Mississippi Department of Education.

Proponents say for-profit management of schools could actually save money. Republican John L. Moore, chairman of the House Education Committee in Mississippi, said privatization has led to cost savings in other governmental sectors.

“We have a system in place within our prison system where for-profit institutions actually have to do it for 10 percent less than the government is doing it,” Moore said.

But in a sign of just how controversial the issue has become, even Moore has compromised on for-profit charter-school managers -- voting in favor of an amendment offered this session to forbid them.

Lessons from Louisiana
Nationally, for-profit school management companies -- as with charter schools more broadly -- have a mixed track record, but limited evidence suggests they perform worse, on average, than their nonprofit counterparts.

One 2012 study from the National Education Policy Center found that nonprofit school operators outperformed for-profits on at least one measure: 48 percent of schools operated by for-profits met minimal expectations for academic growth, compared with 56 percent of those managed by nonprofits. But even Miron, a co-author of the study, said the growth targets (officially known as making “adequate yearly progress”) are a “crude” basis for comparison since they capture only part of a school’s relative success or failure.

New Orleans has become a prime example of how for-profit charter operators’ reach and influence have waned. Eighty percent of the city’s public-school students attend charter schools, the highest proportion in the country.

When public schools in the city reopened during the two years after Hurricane Katrina, for-profit companies were hired to manage five new charters. As of this school year, however, all of the for-profits managers had left the city. Some were fired or left in disgrace.

“Their track record in Louisiana is at best mediocre, and that’s probably being kind,” said Leslie Jacobs, a former state board of education member and charter-school advocate in New Orleans.

Jacobs said that the companies, which usually ask for between 10 and 15 percent of a school’s revenue, struggle to turn a profit while also offering a quality education program with limited funding. In New Orleans, average teacher salaries have gone up considerably since Katrina, adding to schools’ costs.

The for-profits themselves disagree. Michael Serpe of EdisonLearning, one of the largest for-profits in the country, said that requiring management fees while demanding quality isn’t problematic.

“Your bottom line is frankly the outcome and performance of the children in the school,” Serpe said.

The fees could be an even bigger issue in Mississippi, where per-pupil spending is lower than in Louisiana.

But the greatest weakness of for-profits has been a failure to understand local needs, said Matt Candler, the founder of 4.0 Schools, a nonprofit group that works to address a broad array of educational challenges in New Orleans.

“The behaviors of a few for-profits suggested that they were more interested in getting contracts than serving a community,” he said. Candler added that some for-profit companies, including the Michigan-based Leona Group, applied to manage several charter schools right after Katrina. “To even suggest you can take over seven schools in the wake of a disaster so large without anyone on the ground … sends a message about gaining market share over understanding your customer,” he said.

Leona ultimately took the reins at two charter schools. One closed down in 2009, and the board of directors at the second severed relations with the company.

Charter advocates like Candler and Jacobs say it’s not necessary to outlaw for-profit operators as long as there is a rigorous charter authorization process and they can be fired quickly if they perform poorly. In Louisiana, for-profit companies cannot win charter contracts on their own; a nonprofit board gets the contract and then hires the company as a manager. That would probably be the case in Mississippi as well if the for-profit provision goes through. And many charter critics view the debate over for-profit vs. nonprofit as relatively meaningless since they believe all charter schools represent privatization of what should be a government-run enterprise.

If Mississippi decides to allow for-profits to manage charters, Miron said, he’ll worry that the state will attract only the weakest companies because of its low per-pupil spending.

“The bottom-feeders will go into any state,” he said. “They don’t have any problem with compromising their model because of limited funding.”

This story, "New skepticism of for-profit companies managing public schools," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Southern Education Desk, a consortium of public media stations reporting on education issues in the South. Read the Southern Education Desk's version of this story here.

More from The Hechinger Report

• Districts face roadblocks in developing teacher evaluations
• High schools may have to pay for unprepared graduates