The Bristol Observatory

              Incorporated in 1997 by John A. Pandiani, Ph.D., Sociologist 

                                             and Steven M. Banks, Ph.D., Mathematician

The Origins of the PPE Video

(Or how “Steve TV” came to be…)

The video you are about to watch, like many notable cultural artifacts, was the product of the intersection of two opposing forces.  In this case, the first force was Alice Maynard, 5 feet 1 inch, 98 pounds, gray-haired high-energy children’s mental health planner in Vermont. The second force was the United States Center for Mental Health Services, a $700 million Federal bureaucracy with God only knows how many staff and contractors and consultants.

These two forces intersected in a basement conference room in the former Vermont State Hospital in August of 2002, when Alice presented Vermont’s Block Grant performance indicators to a CMHS visiting team.  One of these indicators was a measure of caseload segregation/integration among children’s mental health, juvenile justice, and special education programs in local systems of care.  This is one of many measures of service system performance that are based on PPE, Steve Banks’ method for statistically estimating the unduplicated number of individuals shared by data bases that do not include unique person identifiers.

The Feds didn’t get it, didn’t buy it, dismissed it! Alice was livid.  She said, “We need Steve”, or, we need a portable, virtual Steven Banks. So Alice mobilized the forces of the Vermont Department of Mental Health , Community Access Television in Burlington Vermont, and The Bristol Observatory to produce the video you are about to watch. 

Thanks to Alice Maynard, Steve Banks can continue to inform, educate, entertain, and, hopefully, spread the kind of optimism that says “just because it wasn’t done before, doesn’t mean it can’t be done…”