October 2019

By Sasha Khokha, KQED, October 25, 2019 Classical music plays, silk curtains blow in the wind and comfy couches offer a place to curl up with a book. There are wooden toys, colorful magnetic blocks, and crayons organized by color in glass jars. Children use light projectors to make patterns and shapes on the walls. It may sound like a high-end early childhood education center in California, but this is Tijuana. The students and their parents have fled violence in Central America, or other...

By Anna Maria Barry-Jester, California Healthline, October 28, 2019 Farm laborers in yellow safety vests walked through neatly arranged rows of grapes Friday, harvesting the last of the deep purple bundles that hung from the vines, even as the sky behind them was dark with soot. Over the hill just behind them, firetrucks and first responders raced back and forth from a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection staging area, working to contain a wildfire raging through the rugged...

What is the purpose of having school without power? I work in a small school in a big state. The local school community had the power shut over the weekend as a preventive action for avoiding fires. This morning I was told that there would be school without power and to plan to provide services and teach children without power. My instinct was - this is not safe!

I couldn't be prouder of my home church, Headwaters Covenant Church in Helena, MT. Throughout the fall, we have been purposefully and carefully addressing subjects that the church often avoids. Among these topics are the family dysfunction that results from generational trauma, the prevalence of adversity in childhood within families in Montana, training in suicide awareness and prevention, and moral injury (especially among our veterans and service men and women). Just this last Sunday we...

Naturally, I would at times experience panic attack symptoms, and would almost always cry. Sometimes slow tears cascading down my cheeks. Other times full-on ugly crying, requiring a pause in the action.

By Jim Allen , Thu., Oct. 24, 2019 Think of it as a well-school checkup. On Tuesday morning at Bemiss Elementary School, educators and health professionals spoke enthusiastically about something called Resilience in School Environments, or RISE. A collaboration between Kaiser Permanente and the Spokane and West Valley school districts, the RISE program is expected to lift up teachers and administrators and give them tools to cope with all the challenges of the modern student. The challenges...

By Sandy Bauers, The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 23, 2019 In 1946, Life magazine published an exposé on mental hospitals, focusing on the Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry. The title: “Bedlam 1946.” That dreadful facility, like so many others, eventually closed. A good thing? Not completely, according to Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, who maintains that people simply went from one horrific situation to another, from the grossly inadequate institutions to the dangerous streets. In neither...

By Monica Humphries, NationSwell, October 24, 2019 Debra Burke grew up in the middle of a 500-acre forest in Hardin County, Kentucky. With no electricity or running water, she drank milk that wasn’t pasteurized, cooked with water from a nearby spring and ate vegetables caked with dirt. So when she moved an hour north to Louisville, Kentucky, 23 years ago, it was a bit of a culture shock, she told NationSwell. [ Please click here to read more .]

By Christina Plerhoples, Stacy Schilling, and Joseph Schilling, Housing Matters, October 23, 2019 Recently, Vice published a story about Tamara Adrine-Davis, a resident of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, who is facing jail time because of housing code violations. Adrine-Davis, who is 57 and uses a wheelchair, hasn’t been able to raise the $8,000 needed for home repairs, such as fixing a step on her front porch. The story raises questions about housing code enforcement, which we studied in Memphis,...

By Emily Baumgartner, Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2019 Most experts agree that sweet flavors like cotton candy and mango help entice teens to try their first-ever puff on an electronic cigarette. But what keeps them coming back? Flavors appear to play a role in that too, according to a new study of Los Angeles high school students. Those who vaped with flavors other than tobacco and menthol were more likely to maintain their habit over the long term — and they took more puffs each time...

By Arthur Acolin, Desen Lin, Susan M. Wachter, Cityscape, October 23, 2019 Fifty years after the adoption of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination in the housing market, homeownership rates have not increased for Black or Hispanic[1] households. What factors are suppressing homeownership growth for these households? In this article, researchers analyze how differences in households’ current and expected lifetime income (i.e., household endowment), market conditions, and...

By Dana Goldstein, The New York Times, October 24, 2019 In a typical week, Adrienne Vaccarezza-Isla, a school counselor in Chicago, might help a dozen eighth graders apply to high schools across the city. Or try to convince a mother that her daughter, who had seen her get shot years earlier, should join a group for students dealing with trauma. Or work with sixth and seventh graders on time management. Even though she is the only counselor for 650 children at Avondale-Logandale Elementary...