Barranquilla: IED Alexander Von Humboldt receives millionaire investment - Barranquilla - Colombia

The Alexander Von Humboldt District Educational Institution, positioned as the best public school in the country, will have a new face after an intervention in its infrastructure, which has already been officially announced by Mayor Jaime Pumarejo.

The 750 students who are part of the single day will be the first to benefit from the investment, close to 5 billion pesos: more than 3,000 issued by the District and the rest from the National Government.

The educational center has 52 years running and always standing out at the national level for its academic results.

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The intervention that implies expansion will be carried out through the Educational Infrastructure Financing Fund (FFIE) with the district administration.
“We are going to improve the environment of the entrance, the access, the dining room, the kitchen, two multi-purpose classrooms. In addition, we have just committed to improving the entire landscape environment of the school and, in addition, to improving the computer room that the students themselves asked us for,” said the president.

Pumarejo added that both the IED Alexander Von Humboldt and other campuses are going to undergo a transformation starting this year.

We will give 1,000 scholarships for teachers over the next 2 years and more than 8,000 technical-professional scholarships for our students

“We will give 1,000 scholarships for teachers over the next 2 years and more than 8,000 scholarships for professional technicians for our students when they graduate from high school. We are doing all this and more to ensure that our children have a promising future in Barranquilla,” she said.

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The institution leads the list of top 10 public schools in Barranquilla, located in the top 100 nationwide.

The results of the Colombian Institute for the Evaluation of Education (ICFES), indicate that the educational institutions of Barranquilla with lower performance (category C and D) improved their global index during the pandemic.

Another achievement that highlights the Education secretary is that of the decrease in the number of students with low performance in reading, natural sciences and English.

BARRANQUILLA

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US Unveils Tool to Direct Green Investment to Disadvantaged Communities

WASHINGTON — 

The White House on Friday launched a beta version of a tool that will be used to determine where to invest billions of federal dollars to bring clean energy and infrastructure to disadvantaged communities, a key step in fulfilling a promise by the Biden administration to prioritize environmental justice.

The Council on Environmental Quality unveiled the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, used to map and identify communities that are most in need of investment by weighing income levels and over two dozen socioeconomic, health and environmental indicators.

The software has been under development since early last year with input from the White House environmental justice advisory council as a key input for President Joe Biden’s “Justice40 Initiative,” a goal he set early in his presidency to ensure that 40% of the benefits of federal investments in clean energy get channeled to communities that are overburdened by pollution.

“The Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool will help federal agencies ensure that the benefits of the nation’s climate, clean energy, and environmental programs are finally reaching the communities that have been left out and left behind for far too long,” CEQ Chair Brenda Mallory said.

Using census tract data, the web-based program identifies communities as being disadvantaged if they are above the 65th percentile for income and above the 90th percentile for any of 25 indicators ranging from local asthma rates to traffic and hazardous waste site proximity to unemployment.

But an indicator that is conspicuously absent is race. A Biden administration official told reporters that the tool was designed to be “race neutral” to be able to withstand potential legal challenges.

The omission has disappointed some environmental justice advocates.

Sacoby Wilson, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Health who helped developed a state-level screening tool for Maryland, said the decision not to use race as an indicator is political.

“The science is clear. Race is the biggest predictor of environmental hazard,” he told Reuters.

“We are missing an opportunity by excluding race in the tool,” said Anthony Rogers-Wright, director of environmental justice at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. “The tool is not telling the full story of a community.”

The Environmental Protection Agency also on Friday launched a revamp of its own screening tool, EJSCREEN, which can be used to guide environmental rulemaking.

The CEQ will take public comment on the tool for 60 days.