The Champions for Change White House program is seeking individuals and organizations that have spent the last two years teaching others about the benefits of the Affordable Care Act. Since its passage, the legislation have provided coverage for more than 2.5 million more young Americans and helped ensure those with preexisting conditions can afford coverage, among other benefits.

The White House wants to highlight these “champions” for their efforts in raising awareness about what the Affordable Care Act has done for Americans over the past two years. If you know an individual or organization that has been educating their community on the benefits of health-care reform or helping others benefit under the Affordable Care Act, nominate them using this form by Feb. 16.

The Affordable Care Act was signed by President Obama on March 23, 2010.

Plan B Is Back. Shippensburg University students can now purchase the morning-after pill from a vending machine, even though it’s unavailable on drug store shelves in the area. Students will now have the option of buying the emergency contraceptive for $25 from a vending that also sells condoms and pregnancy tests. “The machine is really used as much for privacy as anything else,” said Roger Serr, the school’s vice president of student affairs. Indeed, the vending machine now provides an alternative for many students who feel uncomfortable going into town to buy the pills. About 85 percent of Shippensburg students support the unorthodox vending machine, according to a university survey.[CBS News]

Progress at Penn. The University of Pennsylvania saw a significant increase in the amount of applicants identifying as LGBT in the early decision round for the Class of 2016, reinforcing the school’s status as the most gay-friendly college in the United States. “Penn consistently, and more recently, has been seen as an environment that is supportive and welcoming across the board of LGBT students and allies,” said Dean of Admissions Eric Furda. Though the Common Application doesn’t include a check box for applicants to indicate sexual orientation, many students choose to self-identify as LGBT through their essays and other written material.  [The Daily Pennsylvanian]

Not Going Quietly. Florida students protested outside the offices of state legislators in the wake of a resounding defeat in the state Senate of a bill that would have extended in-state tuition rates to U.S. born children of illegal immigrants. Though it failed in the upper house, the bill is also making its way through the state House of Representatives. The House version would also extend tuition benefits to undocumented students. “We reside here in [Florida],” said one such student. “We pay taxes, we belong to this community.” The activists say they’ll continue to protest in the coming days.[The Ledger]

Out Of This World. High school senior Erin King celebrated her acceptance into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by sending her acceptance letter on a space mission. Students admitted into MIT follow a tradition where they do something creative with the capsule containing the letter, and the Georgia teen sent hers 91,000 feet into the atmosphere. King produced a video documenting the feat and was remarkably able to recover the capsule after it returned to Earth by using two GPS-equipped radio transmitters. Looks like she’ll do just fine at MIT. [Huffington Post]

MTV recently released My College Dollars, a financial aid application on the popular social networking site that helps students fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms and gives them information on other available scholarships.

The app provides students with star-studded informational (and inspirational) videos—starring Jason Derulo, for instance—with information about state and federal aid; it also automatically alerts students about scholarships based on their Facebook information

My College Dollars is not replacing governmental services, but is working to bring the information and resources to more people. The app provides FAFSA information and contacts for more assistance, as well as a thorough explanation of the processes of FAFSA, scholarships, and other aid programs.

The scholarship listings number in the hundreds, from general art and science scholarships to major-specific awards. A student majoring in aerospace, for example, would find results on both general science scholarship and ones related to aerospace on My College Dollars. Some searches will still garnish 250 results, but the app links to College Board where such a search can be further refined.

Both high school graduates and current college students can search scholarships by state, minority status, and gender. The options for minority status however are not completely inclusive: there is no option for multiracial students.

Other problems exist in an “ethnic background” box where nationalities such as Chinese and Japanese are named but not others like Korean or Thai. Like any new site, there are always ways to improve. My College Dollars could take a few straightforward steps to make the app more inclusive and appeal to a greater audience.

My College Dollars must be able to truly make a difference in the lives of students who use the app, if it fails to provide results, future aspiring college students will have look for help elsewhere. It’s great that a major company like MTV is investing in America’s next generation—especially when so many students don’t even know how to access the resources to apply for college aid.

My College Dollars will work to help expand the reach of federal aid. By reaching more students, and providing them with resources to help them attain higher education, MTV could move the bar set by College Board and college prep companies up a notch.

College assistance has now flowed into the social networking stream—whether My College Dollars succeeds or not. 

Rep. David Rivera (R-Fla.) introduced the bill, called the Adjusted Residency for Military Service Act (ARMS Act) last month, and it’s already causing a stir among American immigration advocates.

The bill takes the DREAM Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for undocumented young people who pursue higher education or military service, and removes the clause allowing immigrant youth to become citizens through education.

In December 2010, the DREAM Act passed the House by a vote of 216-198, but failed in the Senate by five votes due to a lack of bipartisan support.

“If somebody is willing to die for America, then certainly they deserve a chance at life in America,” Rivera told the Miami Herald.

But many immigration-reform supporters find this bill troubling.

Ai Noorani, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum, described the ARMS Act as a “distortion of the DREAM Act.”

Some reformers argue excluding legalization through military service would give undocumented youth the wrong incentives for enlisting. It’s dignified to enlist voluntarily and such a move should be applauded, they say, but there are other ways to serve your country and benefit the American economy.

And some say the ARMS Act would send the wrong message to American citizens and the rest of the world by valuing military service over the education of the country’s future leaders.

Policymakers and education officials frequently discuss how the United States can improve its education ranks in relation to the rest of the world and part of the solution lies in the DREAM Act. Many undocumented youth are motivated and dedicated to leading successful lives and being productive American citizens.

These immigrants are young people with budding potential to develop the U.S. workforce and middle class. Denying them a right to citizenship is only detrimental to the U.S. society and economy.

The federal appeals court found itself in the national spotlight after delivering a high profile ruling in which it upheld a decision to strike down California’s controversial Proposition 8, which outlawed same-sex marriage in the state.

The decision caused a frenzy, crashing the court’s website within minutes of the announcement, and Prop. 8 instantly became one of the top trending topics on Twitter.

There’s no doubt that the decision is welcome news for California’s same-sex couples who saw their right to marriage revoked when Prop 8 narrowly passed four years ago.

But the decision may not be as far-reaching as marriage equality advocates would have liked.

Some policy experts are skeptical that the ruling will have any significant impact outside of California, as the court’s opinion may have been too narrowly tailored.

Indeed, the Ninth Circuit largely ignored the sweeping language employed by District Judge Vaughn Walker when Prop 8 was rejected the first time.

Walker deemed the ballot proposition unconstitutional on the grounds that “tradition alone … cannot form the basis of a rational law.”

Such a rationale, if used by a federal court, would have effectively rendered unconstitutional any state law banning gay marriage. The Ninth Circuit instead struck down Prop 8 because it took away rights that same-sex couples enjoyed prior to its enactment, heavily citing precedent established in the Supreme Court’s decision in Romer v. Evans.

The difference is critical.

The court’s decision can only be used as precedent in cases where same-sex couples were previously granted marriage rights and then had them rescinded, which is not the situation in the overwhelming majority of the 44 states that do not allow same-sex marriage.

The court’s saving grace may lie in the strong likelihood that the Supreme Court will ultimately review the ruling. Should the high court agree to hear the case, it would have the opportunity to reject Prop 8 using a much broader rationale that could potentially legalize same-sex marriage nationwide. Conversely, however, the Court could choose to uphold Prop 8—a decision that would be a devastating setback for the LGBT community—or decide not to hear arguments.

The Ninth Circuit’s ruling on Prop 8 should certainly celebrated—but with a caveat, as the specific language of the decision does little to advance the cause of marriage equality on a national level.

Reid was the commanding officer on the scene, and is featured in a viral YouTube video of an Occupy DC protester who was tased in the back last week.

I was just one of many on the scene who were knocked into a thronging crowd of people when the riot cops’ dispersal orders stopped agreeing with the laws of physics and the Park Police’s orderly quasi-eviction of the Occupy encampment took a shockingly violent turn.

Around 4:30 on Feb. 4, a number of occupiers decided to sit down in front of their camp’s library to prevent police from seizing it. Park Police’s Public Information Officer David Schlosser had previously issued a statement that the library would be spared—it had a flap open and didn’t contain sleeping paraphernalia, which gave it the OK under the no-camping regulations police and hazardous materials teams had been enforcing since dawn.

There had been a few clashes and arrests earlier in the day as officers cordoned off the park section by section, but occupiers seemed resigned by the afternoon as cleanup crews carefully bagged personal property for later retrieval and threw away what they deemed to be trash or a biohazard.

When Park Police officers prepared to inspect the library and ensure its compliance, though, occupiers weren’t ready to trust them. The officers had betrayed them too often that day, occupiers said, claiming that some empty tents that complied with the department’s rules were still confiscated.

No one was prepared for what followed. A line of Park Police officers in full riot gear encroached upon the crowd.

“Mooove back!” came the rhythmic call from one officer, though the directions weren’t clear. Who was he talking to? How far back was far back enough? I intended to stay as long as I lawfully could to film what happened, and I wasn’t alone.

Then officers said people who weren’t planning to sit down should leave. “Are you sitting or leaving?” they said. “Turn and move, turn and move.”

Except for one problem—a lot of people had nowhere to turn or move.

I had virtually no options. To my left was a metal barricade with police on the other side of it. Behind me was a crowd of people and the camp’s information tent. On the right, a perpendicular phalanx of officers was boxing in the crowd. A narrow sidewalk was the only route way possible, but most of that was also being blocked by officers or other occupiers.

“We’re trying to exit,” one photographer said repeatedly in response to dispersal orders who was blocked from doing so by two merging police lines.

Still, the demands to “turn and move” continued. To emphasize this point, officers began shoving demonstrators and onlookers with their riot shields. And shoving. And shoving.

You’ll see in my video footage below that the young women next to me were pushing back against a cop’s riot shield after he started pushing. That wasn’t smart, and it certainly didn’t help the situation. Still, a couple of unarmed, 5-foot-tall girls are hardly a match for a cop in full riot gear, and I’d at least question whether using batons on them, as this officer did, was the best way to de-escalate things and get them to disperse.

When the shoving match next to me became more intense, I realized I should try harder to get out of there—but Sgt. Reid didn’t give me the chance. He and another officer came towards me, seemingly out of nowhere, sticking batons in my face and yelling “Back up!”

I had about two seconds to back away and try to comply before Reid jabbed me backwards with his baton, and another few seconds to get jostled around in the crowd and scream for help before Reid sent me sprawling into the mass of people behind me with another baton-aided shove to my back.

I panicked. People die in crowds like this, I thought. I screamed, and flailed, and screamed some more, until some kind person pulled me up and some others calmed me down and helped me move away from the scene.

(I filed an official complaint against Sgt. Reid with the Park Police’s Internal Affairs department, and they have been responsive to my request. However, officials said they cannot provide any official information on this incident.)

Below is my video footage of what happened.

There’s another view of my tumble—and a better picture of the general disarray that kept people who wanted to leave from doing so—in Eddie Becker’s video, which accompanied Jefferson Morley’s excellent Salon article about what happened on Feb. 4 (the crackdown begins around 4:30). Morley also reported being shoved and sent sprawling by officers with riot shields. It turns out that I was standing right next to the two of them—indeed, I fell on top of poor Eddie.

My encounter was just the beginning of the mayhem.

Horse-mounted police joined the fray and terrified those in their path. Dozens of other people were knocked back, domino-style, with riot shields into crowds behind them or beaten with batons. People tripped over debris. Others cursed the cops and resisted moving back. One protester was knocked unconscious before being arrested. Another threw a full Coke bottle—not a brick, as previously reported—and seriously injured a police officer. Sgt. Reid had another shining moment trying to grab someone’s camera and push that person back when he was stuck against a fence, seen at 0:38 in this video.

Walking down the middle of K Street after all the occupiers had finally been pushed out of McPherson Square, you’d think a bomb had just gone off inside the park. People were screaming, crying, cursing, walking around in a daze, and hugging each other for comfort.

I passed one young man who was weeping after he’d been knocked down by police, another who had been hit in the head and was leaning on his friends, another in hysterics after having witnessed, he said, a 14-year-old girl being trampled by police. I heard similar accounts about the girl from half a dozen people, but haven’t yet found any reports of what happened.

Eleven people were arrested that day, including Jeremiah DeSousa, who was charged with assault with a deadly weapon for the Coke bottle incident. Protester Nathan Gorecky sustained head injuries and a broken arm before being arrested.

Without question, as at other encampments, there were protesters who acted out of line and deliberately failed to comply with police orders.

Still, the show of force by officers in this situation was sudden and shocking and executed with seemingly little concern for efficient de-escalation or peaceful dispersal.

Did police really take the word of one occupier, as seen in Becker’s video at Salon, who said people were unlikely to leave the camp peacefully, and then act under the assumption that everyone assembled there would refuse to disperse without force? Did the two dozen cops bussed in from New York City have anything to do with these stepped-up tactics? (Schlosser, the public information officer, hasn’t returned my calls about these questions.)

The incident is especially shocking because the Park Police have been the good guys. They were portrayed in the media as the easygoing officers used to enforcing First Amendment issues, the ones sticking up for the rights of demonstrators. And from what I’ve observed while covering this movement, that picture seemed pretty accurate.

“These guys [DC Park Police], for four months, didn’t write us any tickets,” said occupier Brian Eister on a live video stream last week, before the police action. “I fucking hate the cops—Oakland, LA, NYPD. But these are not those guys.”

A lot of occupiers I talked to might grumble about the “pigs,” as they’re sometimes called at encampments, but they’d still give the Park Police credit for treating demonstrators with respect and protecting their rights.

The tasing incident, which Sgt. Reid oversaw, caused that mutual respect to start to crumble. And after this forceful eviction, it will be much harder to repair. 

University of China—Washington? In order to make up for cuts in funding from state governments, many universities have turned to China to make up the loss of revenue. Schools such as the University of Washington have are increasingly recruiting foreign students (often Chinese applicants) instead of focusing on in-state students; such students pay more in tuition that in-staters. While school administrators say they recognize this trend has a direct impact on in-state students, the financial benefits of foreign students has proved too hard for some to pass up. [New York Times]

Best Value Schools. Students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia, among several other institutions, are receiving one of the top value educations among all public schools, according to a new report. The Princeton Review released its list of the “Best Value” public schools, revealing which public institutions are giving students the most bang for their buck. As recent discussions have highlighted both college affordability and the quality of higher education, schools on this list find themselves in an even better position than before. [Huffington Post]

Free MIT Education? Professors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently announced the creation of an open source education program at the prestigious school. Known as MITx, the program will provide free and open access to online course content that, with completion, can lead to participants receiving a certificate from the school. In an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, two of the professors behind the idea—L. Rafael Reif, the school’s provost, and Anant Agarwal, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory— said they’re not concerned about any negative impact the new model could have on traditional colleges. “If it does [become a threat], then the residential model has to get better,” Reif said. [Chronicle of Higher Education]