1978

This month, a few notes from the education community. Irv Richardson recently became national program director for the Society for Developmental Education, which offers more than 500 conferences a year to elementary-school teachers, on subjects from developmental education to whole-language educational techniques.

Irv got his master's in school administration from the University of Southern Maine and spent 14 years with the Freeport, Maine, public schools as a teacher and a teaching principal. He was Maine's Teacher of the Year in 1988 and won the National Educator Award from the Milken Family Foundation in '92. Irv has also served as an educational consultant with Maine's State Department of Education. He lives in Peterborough with his wife, Katie, and their kids Jamie, a fifth-grader at South Meadow School, and Amanda, a second-grader at Peterborough Elementary School.

Nick Sakhnovsky is dean of students and world-history teacher at the University School of Nova Southeastern University in suburban Fort Lauderdale, Fla."I am entering my 15th year in secondary education," writes Nick, "years which have been interspersed with stints in graduate school, receiving my J.D. from the University of Florida College of Law in 1986 and Specialist in Education Leadership from Florida Atlantic University College of Education in 1994. By next fall I hope to have an Ed.D. as well.

"Much of my teaching has been conducted in the public schools of inner city Miami. The fact that modern education has been in crisis during the entire span of my career reflects the irony that the system is bureaucratically inured, with survival frequently replacing excellence as its reason for existence.

"I am now in the third year of marriage with my marathoner wife, Alice, with whom I enjoy living and traveling."

Since 1989, Mara Dinsmoor has been on the faculty at the Medical College of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. "I am currently an associate professor in the department of obstetrics and gynecology, in the Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine," writes Mara. "That basically means that I specialize in high-risk pregnancies. This includes doing prenatal diagnosis and managing pregnancies that are complicated by growth abnormalities, pre-term labor, and maternal medical problems such as diabetes. My 'sub' subspecialty is infectious diseases, so I end up caring for a majority of the HlVinfected pregnant women in the Central Virginia area as well.

"Despite the economic pressures being put on academic medical centers in recent years, I remain committed to medical education. Training medical students and housestaff truly keeps you on your toes and helps me maintain my enthusiasm for the field."

For a long time Peter Vaughan was an ecologist and population specialist in the biology department at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. Now Peter is an independent consultant, traveling all over the world studying the use of mass media to promote family planning and AIDS prevention. He also consults with Population Communications International, a non-profit group in New York, and attended last year's United Nations Conference on Population and Development in Cairo with Al Gore. Cathy Anson, who holds down the fort in St. Paul, is a family practitioner. Peter and Cathy have two kids: Elliot 6 and Angus 4.

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