View from an Oregon special education administrator: Mental health, behavior, staffing among biggest challenges

View from an Oregon special education administrator: Mental health, behavior, staffing among biggest challenges

This is another story in OPB’s series on the state of special education. You can read the first story here, the second story here, and the most recent story here.

OPB’s series on the state of special education has featured students, parents, and staff members across the Portland area. The series has found that some students with disabilities are missing out on school while staff are stretched thin trying to deal with increased needs.

Education reporter Elizabeth Miller recently spoke with a top staff member at one of Oregon’s largest school districts, Beaverton special education administrator Kelly Raf, about the challenges she sees from the district office.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Kelly Raf: Special education is a field that is always growing and evolving. We’re always responding to the increased needs that we’re seeing in

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Puzzle Solving Behavior Spreads Through Bumblebee Colonies

Puzzle Solving Behavior Spreads Through Bumblebee Colonies

Puzzle-Solving Behavior Spreads Through Bumblebee Colonies

Bumblebees can learn by watching a trained bee demonstrating one of two ways to solve puzzle for a sugary reward, then copy the bee to solve the puzzle in the same way. Credit: Diego Perez-Lopez, PLOS (CC-BY 4.0)

Bees that learned from others were more adept and preferred the learned solution over alternatives.

Bumblebees learn to solve a puzzle by watching more experienced bees, and this behavioral preference then spreads through the colony, according to a study published on March 7th in the open access journal PLOS Biology by Alice Dorothy Bridges and colleagues at Queen Mary University of London, UK.

Social animals like primates are skilled at learning by watching others, and previous work has shown that individual bees can learn tasks in this way, but it remained unclear whether these new behaviors would then spread through the colony. To investigate, researchers tested six colonies of bumblebees (

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