July 2018

Sometimes in addiction treatment, just getting free from using drugs or alcohol can hijack all our attention. I cannot stress enough how important it is to recognize trauma’s role when we talk about addiction treatment and recovery. The article “ The Link Between Trauma and Addiction ” by the Maryland Addiction Recovery Center made this point so well. I want to follow up from a trauma-informed care perspective. There is always a reason someone is using. When a pattern of addiction behavior...

Teaching self and mutual respect to eliminate bullying

Summer is upon us, which means an increase in street crime and ice cream consumption. However, neither one causes the other; they are both highly correlatedwith summer’s heat, which brings more people out of their homes and onto the streets, where some eat ice cream and some get mugged. Correlation is not causality. Here are two more facts to ponder: American children take lots of standardized, machine-scored, multiple-choice tests, and they are getting fatter. Is this just another...

WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Friday blocked Kentucky’s closely watched plan to require many Medicaid recipients to work, volunteer or train for a job as a condition of coverage. The state had been poised to start carrying out the new rules next week and to phase them in fully by the end of this year. Judge James E. Boasberg of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, an Obama appointee, ruled that the Trump administration’s approval of the plan had been “arbitrary and...

On August 5, 2012, six people were gunned down by a white supremacist at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, including Satwant Singh Kaleka, the temple’s president. In the aftermath of the shooting, Singh Kaleka’s son, Pardeep, reached out to Arno Michaelis, a former white supremacist-turned-activist, to help him find answers amidst his confusion and heartbreak. Out of this meeting, Serve 2 Unite was born. The organization works primarily with Milwaukee-based schools, bringing together...

According to an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle , residential retreats aimed at developing leadership and empathy in high school students are using questionable methods such as asking participants to reenact racist behavior, shout degrading slurs at one another and divulge family trauma. While some students say the camp experiences are transformative, the investigation finds the teaching methods suspect, unethical and possibly harmful. A San Jose judge has now called for the Bay...

To read more of Yoshiaki Nohara 's article, please click here .

To read more of Catherine Porter 's article, please click here .

As the federal narrative around President Donald Trump's "zero tolerance" immigration policy rapidly shifts, and Congress struggles to draft legislation to ensure humane treatment of children and their families at the border, the nation's mayors and governors are scrambling to take what local action they can. Recently, 19 mayors of large United States cities gathered in Tornillo, Texas, hoping to get a glimpse of the 1,500 children being held in a detention facility there, only to be denied...

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) is taking a new approach to Title II (the portion of the Juvenile Justice Delinquency and Prevention Act authorizing states to innovate efforts to improve juvenile justice systems and ensure the fair treatment of youth) that will facilitate better communication and increase trust between OJJDP and the states. This will give OJJDP more time to focus on compliance and programming assistance, and it will allow states to redirect...

As we scroll through the latest apologies in our news feeds ( I’m sorry if anyone was offended ; it was the culture back then ; I’m mostly sorry but not for THAT one ), it’s easy to see what apologies are not. But I’ve been thinking a lot about what apologies are, and why we make them. A few months ago, I flew from New York to Wisconsin to say I’m sorry to my ex-wife. We had been together for 14 years when she was told she had breast cancer in 2006. I was beside her through her surgery and...

Empathy, tolerance and acceptance: More and more, educators are focusing on the importance of schools' paying attention to stuff other than academics. And for the past two months, an exhibit at the U.S. Department of Education's headquarters in Washington, D.C., has gathered the work of student artists expressing themselves — through their work — about these issues. The exhibit is called "Total Tolerance," and it highlights themes of racism, sexism and diversity. [For more on this story by...