January 2016

In 2013, the West Virginia Center for Children’s Justice launched a program called Handle With Care . The collaborative  program is meant to help children who’ve experienced abuse, neglect or other types of trauma succeed in school. The program that started on the West Side of Charleston is now expanding across the state and in other communities across the nation. [For more of this story, written by Roxy Todd, go...

“The Journey to the Heart” Summit was created for the survivors of emotional abuse, physical abuse, mental abuse, child sexual abuse, or trauma of any kind.  It was also designed to help the spouses, families, and friends of trauma survivors. Starting on January 15th,  you’ll have access to interviews with more than twenty therapists, coaches, teachers, trauma specialists, authors, trainers, and healers.  Each one will teach you how to overcome abuse or...

This is, put simply, one of the best books on mindfulness that I have read. In Daily Meditations for Calming Your Angry Mind: Mindfulness Practices to Free Yourself from Anger, Jeffrey Brantley and Wendy Millstine provide about forty mindfulness exercises to help people focus on their special need or challenge regarding anger. They help us use various meditations to move past anger and instead respond to things that upset us with calm and kindness. Brantley and...

Claudio Sanchez is the senior member of the NPR Ed team, with more than 25 years on the education beat. We asked him for his list of the top stories he'll be watching in 2016. 1. The New Federal Education Law The long, grueling fight to overhaul the 14-year-old No Child Left Behind law is over, but that'll turn out to be the easy part. The new Every Student Succeeds Act returns most government oversight of schools back to states. But there are no guarantees that the states will do a better...

At the end of Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 novel Sister Carrie, the ruined, homeless George Hurstwood commits suicide in a New York City flophouse. "A slow, black boat setting out from the pier at Twenty-seventh Street upon its weekly errand bore, with many others, his nameless body to the Potter's Field,” wrote Dreiser. More than a century later, such anonymous burials in “potters’ fields” for the indigent or unknown are still generally the norm in U.S. cities. But...

Talking about grief and the loss of a loved one isn't typically dinner conversation. Many people, even those struggling to cope with loss, will avoid talking about such heavy topics, especially over supper. But a fledgling nonprofit designs dinners specifically for young adults to get together and talk about their experiences with loss. In cities across the country, the group The Dinner Party advises 20- and 30-somethings on how to arrange these gatherings. Some say it's one of the new ways...

When asked if she remembers feeling safe in her home while growing up, Laurie replied, “Never.” Raised in rural Washington state, her father cut her off from contact with any adults who might have been able to intervene to stop the sexual, physical and emotional abuse she and her siblings suffered. “He would go into rages over really small things and scream at us, call us names, hit us, psychologically torture us,” said Laurie, who is being identified only by her...

The founding Monument Academy teachers and staff knew that running a 24-hour school for children who’ve survived trauma and violence would be difficult. They just didn’t know how difficult. “It was chaotic,” said Emily Bloomfield, the school’s founder and CEO, recalling the first few weeks of class last summer. “There was a lot of fighting ... a lot of cursing, a lot of running around.” The 40 fifth-graders who started in August at this unusual new...

In the first version of her story, Grace Costa says that, on the night after Christmas, in 2012, her ex-boyfriend broke into her house, hid behind her bedroom door, and then attacked her as she and her two grown children—a son and a daughter—were about to eat dinner. In the second version, it’s still the night after Christmas, but it might be 2013, and only her daughter is at home with her. There’s a half-eaten apple on the floor of the kitchen; she remembers...

Expectant moms who participate in group prenatal care rather than individual care appear to reap significant health benefits for both themselves and their babies, according to a new study led by the Yale School of Public Health. The findings show that young women who received group prenatal care were 33 percent less likely to have babies who were small for gestational age. Furthermore, group-care moms had a lower risk for preterm delivery and low birthweight. Their infants also spent fewer...

Education issues can be difficult to grasp; they can feel  overwhelming, intangible, or even irrelevant. Sometimes, the best and most effective means of conveying education stories are through charts, graphics, images, and videos. Here are some of the visuals from around the Internet this past year that helped visualize what mattered—student debt, early-childhood education, regional inequality in schools, campus protests, and so on—in a way that was engaging and provocative.

Justin King spends most of his hours in a cinderblock dormitory room for minimum-security prisoners, sleeping on a metal bunk bed and being constantly monitored by surveillance cameras. But on a crisp California morning with coastal fog hanging on the hillsides, King, who is serving time for selling methamphetamines, and three of his fellow inmates at the Mendocino County jail huddle together in a 175-acre vineyard to  pick plump sangiovese grapes . The only visible difference between...