June 2016

Pottstown officials are taking steps to reduce instances of childhood trauma among students in the school district. The topic was discussed during a roundtable at the Pottstown Early Action for Kindergarten Readiness, or PEAK, program's annual meeting at Montgomery County Community College. A program of the school district, PEAK partners with private child care locations to provide prekindergarten education to local students. The trauma that officials hope to reduce is related to adverse...

Juvenile justice advocates receive little glory, but they deserve much credit for the wave of state activity this year aimed at protecting youth from the harms of adult court prosecution. Consider just a few recent developments in diverse regions of the country. In the last few weeks, legislatures in Louisiana and South Carolina passed bills — awaiting their governors’ signatures — to raise the age of juvenile court jurisdiction to 18. Michigan will soon vote on a similar bill. In Indiana,...

How would you react if suddenly hospitals simply replaced in-person patient visitation with video conferencing? Hospital administrators might justify this decision by saying that hospitals are scary places, so it‘s best to protect family members, especially young people, from being traumatized. The idea that a bureaucracy could so severely restrict a family’s right to see their loved ones might seem unthinkable. However, for the 2.3 million people who were incarcerated in the United States,...

Earlier this week, Paul Ryan released an anti-poverty agenda on behalf of House Republicans. The proposal is the first plank of Ryan’s “ A Better Way ” policy agenda, which he’s touted as an alternative legislative agenda to that put forth by the always-controversial Donald Trump. Ryan, along with a number of fellow House Republicans, unveiled the proposals at House of Help City of Hope, a non-profit organization that provides a variety of social services in Washington, D.C.’s poor Anacostia...

One of the more memorable statements of Barack Obama’s presidency thus far has been his claim, in a high-profile December 2013 speech , that great and growing economic inequality is “the defining challenge of our time.” In making his case Obama appealed to the authority of a seemingly unlikely ally: Adam Smith, the purported founding father of laissez-faire capitalism, who is widely thought to have advocated unbridled greed and selfishness in the name of allowing the invisible hand of the...

The Clermont County Juvenile Detention Center will be providing trauma informed case management and services after being awarded $56,051 from the Ohio Department of Youth Services. The DYS awarded $1,628,804 in funding to 23 counties through the Detention Alternatives and Enhancements Initiative, which was created to keep juveniles from continuing down a path of crime, according to a press release from the DYS. “Implementation grants will help fund physical plant enhancements as well as...

No great universities exist in the world without a deep institutional commitment to academic freedom, free inquiry, and free expression. For the past 60 years, American research universities have been vigilant against external and internal attempts to limit or destroy these values. The First Amendment scholar Geoffrey Stone has noted that free expression, in one form or another, has been continually under attack on campuses for the past 100 years. Today, these core university values are...

Drugs, domestic violence and poor mental health are among the reasons few fostered children are successfully returned to their biological family, according to a leading charity chief. Matt Forde, head of service for NSPCC Scotland said such social problems, combined with neglect were leaving children at substantial risk of physical abuse and emotional harm. He was speaking at the launch of the first findings from a pioneering scheme which aims to give parents every chance to resolve the...

On a July night in 2011, 16-year-old Jose Ferran was shot in the shoulder. He spent only a few hours in the emergency department of the city's St. Christopher's Hospital for Children before doctors sent him home. His injury wasn't life threatening, and he'd heal with outpatient therapy. So he returned to the North Philadelphia neighborhood where he'd been shot, in an ongoing feud between rival "squads" of teenagers in his predominantly middle-class, Hispanic section of the city. Most...

Latest research from a national sample of almost 10,000 U.S. adolescents found psychological trauma, especially abuse and domestic violence before age 11, can increase the likelihood of experimentation with drugs in adolescence, independent of a history of mental illness. Results of the study conducted at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health are published online in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. This is the first study to document...

Medical students cram a lot of basic science and medicine into their first two years of training. But most learn next to nothing about the intricacies of the health care system they will soon enter. That's something the medical school at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., is trying to remedy. "Clinicians today have to graduate being great providers of individual care," says Dr. Lawrence Deyton, the senior associate dean who's spearheading the new curriculum. "But they also...

Nine-thousand feet up in the Colombian Andes, in the province of Boyacá, a little orange schoolhouse sits on a hillside dotted with flowers. Thirty-three students, ages 4 through 11, walk as much as an hour to get here from their families' farms. The students greet reporters in English — "Welcome! Welcome!" — and Spanish, with a song and a series of performances. In one, an 8-year-old in a green school uniform and a colorful feather mask recites a folk tale about a terrible, tobacco-smoking...