A pair of living-donor kidney transplant surgeries performed at Duke University Medical Center this week appear to have been successful, doctors say.

The operations involved two people who needed kidney transplants and two willing to give one kidney each.

“I’m sore, but I’m doing fine,” said Jennifer Gommer, 39, of Holly Springs, who originally offered one of her kidneys to her mother but wasn’t a match.

Her mom, Sue Gommer, was matched to Brad Dean, 43, president of the Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce, who had offered to give a kidney if a donor needed one because he felt it was the right thing to do.

And Jennifer’s kidney went to Jeffrey Rogers, 42, a former construction worker from Robeson County.

The unusual arrangement is called a paired donation or domino transplant. The first was performed in 2001 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Duke officials had believed theirs was the first in North Carolina, but Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte did its first paired kidney transplant in June 2008. A team at East Carolina University’s Brody School of Medicine and Pitt County Memorial Hospital expects to do a similar series of operations involving three donor-recipient pairs. A university spokesman said those surgeries are set for next week.

Good news for paired-donation surgery

The pairings with living donors allow recipients to bypass years-long waiting lists for organs from deceased donors. A kidney from a living donor also generally has a better chance of functioning properly once it’s transplanted, and will usually last longer than one from a deceased donor.

In the surgeries done Monday, everything seemed to go as expected, according to Dr. Matt Ellis, head of Duke’s kidney transplant program.

“Everyone is doing well,” Ellis said. “They’re recovering right along the course that we think they should.”

Jennifer Gommer left the hospital on Tuesday. Ellis said Dean, Sue Gommer’s donor, may have been released Thursday. Both kidney recipients should go home over the weekend.

Proponents of domino-transplant procedures eventually hope to see a statewide database that could make the complex matches quicker and easier, and make it possible for the surgeries to take place in different hospitals instead of in multiple operating rooms in one hospital.

Jennifer Gommer said her mother is doing well and that her new kidney began working right away.

Jennifer said she had not met Rogers, who received her kidney, while she was at Duke, but that his family had spoken to her in the hallway to thank her for her donation.

Jennifer, a pharmacist, said she planned to take some time off from work to recover and help her mother once she’s home from the hospital.

In the meantime, she said, “I’ve got a Christmas party to go to this weekend, and I’m planning on making it.”

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The Data Quality Campaign (DQC) could easily declare victory. Since its founding in 2005, the majority of states have made tremendous progress implementing the 10 Essential Elements of Statewide Data Systems. And those that lag behind, through their acceptance of State Fiscal Stabilization Fund stimulus money, have committed to do so. Kudos to DQC for recognizing that despite these essential foundational efforts, the real work remains.

The whole point of collecting all of this information — and DQC is clear that they mean much more than just test scores — is to use it to inform inquiry, human judgment, and decision-making. DQC’s new report, Data for Action 2011, shows that states still struggle to actually use this information effectively.

In addition to state-by-state results, the report outlines four key issues for states to overcome:

• Turf: The current culture and structures in education do not support working across traditional boundaries.
• Trust: Skepticism about the quality and use of data persists because data previously were primarily used as a hammer to punish rather than a flashlight to illuminate and inform continuous improvement.
• Technical Issues: Technical issues remain; however, solutions are emerging and require the leadership and political will to implement them.
• Time: Competing priorities and scarce resources present challenges to continuing to allocate adequate time to building and using state longitudinal data systems.

Of the 10 state actions that DQC surveys, states are having the most trouble with two that deal directly with getting information into the hands of educators and families:

• Action 5: Implement systems to provide all stakeholders with timely access to the information they need while protecting student privacy, and
• Action 9: Implement policies and promote practices, including professional development and credentialing, to ensure that educators know how to access, analyze and use data appropriately.

These point to a “last mile problem” with regards to data use. First, states have too often focused on their own administrative needs, rather than on educators’ needs. Second, if much of the rhetoric around data use is its potential to improve instruction, then much of the relevant data is at a local level — and may actually differ across schools. States have to find ways to not only improve the capacity of districts and schools, but do so in a way that still enables local flexibility. While the work of building data systems was often relegated to a technical team in the state capitol, there’s no way to effectively use data systems without much more coordination and deep engagement, not only within and across state agencies, but also with the districts, schools, educators, and families that actually need to use the data.

Montessori enables the young students understand the different concepts taught in the Montessori pre-school education starting from the known to the unknown elements and concepts. This enables the children use what they have been carefully created for as learning materials by their teachers by studying and understanding them at a student’s individual pace. This enables the students develop self esteem and the ability to learn independently without any kind of pressure or negative influence. The areas that they are taught include

Math is where the students are taught to understand the concepts of math using materials available to them to understand both the spatial and size discrimination. This in future ensures that the child develops the skills of being able to create advanced concepts in math.

Language in an organized Montessori environment enables the students develop the language skills. This develops through the children being able to read, communicate through the growth of vocabulary and language, understanding the sequencing from both left to right.

Use of all the senses in Montessori is key. The students are encouraged to determine relationships between objects imitate, implement designs. This enables the students to observe, make judgments, and interact with the environment they are in making them independent learners.

The day today living – This ensures the students learn about self care, environmental care, courtesy, grace and peace. This ensures that they interact with other people and carry out each of their activities in an orderly manner.

Cultural and geographical studies – This ensures that the children appreciate the diversity in culture and its contribution to harmony hence creating peace globally.

Art, Music and Movement – They all play a very important role in ensuring that students develop motor skills. The art is important because it encourages creativity in children.

Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white.

“I didn’t want to put ‘Asian’ down,” Olmstead says, “because my mom told me there’s discrimination against Asians in the application process.”

For years, many Asian-Americans have been convinced that it’s harder for them to gain admission to the nation’s top colleges.

Studies show that Asian-Americans meet these colleges’ admissions standards far out of proportion to their 6 percent representation in the U.S. population, and that they often need test scores hundreds of points higher than applicants from other ethnic groups to have an equal chance of admission. Critics say these numbers, along with the fact that some top colleges with race-blind admissions have double the Asian percentage of Ivy League schools, prove the existence of discrimination.

The way it works, the critics believe, is that Asian-Americans are evaluated not as individuals, but against the thousands of other ultra-achieving Asians who are stereotyped as boring academic robots.

Now, an unknown number of students are responding to this concern by declining to identify themselves as Asian on their applications.

For those with only one Asian parent, whose names don’t give away their heritage, that decision can be relatively easy. Harder are the questions that it raises: What’s behind the admissions difficulties? What, exactly, is an Asian-American and is being one a choice?

Olmstead is a freshman at Harvard and a member of HAPA, the Half-Asian People’s Association. In high school she had a perfect 4.0 grade-point average and scored 2150 out of a possible 2400 on the SAT, which she calls “pretty low.”

College applications ask for parent information, so Olmstead knows that admissions officers could figure out a student’s background that way. She did write in the word “multiracial” on her own application.

Still, she would advise students with one Asian parent to “check whatever race is not Asian.”

“Not to really generalize, but a lot of Asians, they have perfect SATs, perfect GPAs, … so it’s hard to let them all in,” Olmstead says.

Amalia Halikias is a Yale freshman whose mother was born in America to Chinese immigrants; her father is a Greek immigrant. She also checked only the “white” box on her application.

“As someone who was applying with relatively strong scores, I didn’t want to be grouped into that stereotype,” Halikias says. “I didn’t want to be written off as one of the 1.4 billion Asians that were applying.”

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