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The first time I was abandoned I was only six years old and I remember the day as if it just happened yesterday. I was sitting on a courtroom floor, cooing over my newborn little sister and making her laugh as I dangled a pearl necklace over her face. My mother and her new husband were sitting on the hard wooden bench directly behind me and I remember hearing Mom groan as a dark haired man in a tan trench coat entered the courtroom. The dark-haired man sat down at the far end of the wooden...

It’s early morning, and the ladies hover around the bus stop gossiping about the day ahead. At 10 years old, I stick close to my aunt Geevie as we wait for the next city bus headed toward Windsor Farms, a part of Richmond, Va., where men don’t mow their own lawns. Geevie and I each hold twine-handled bags filled with goodies to hold us through the day: Baby Ruth candy bars fresh out the freezer, potato chips and two bottles of Coca-Cola. On this day, Geevie wears a billowy floral blouse and...

Consider Waukegan and Stevenson, two Illinois school districts separated by 20 miles — and an enormous financial gulf. Stevenson, mostly white, is flush with resources. The high school has five different spaces for theater performances, two gyms, an Olympic-size pool and an espresso bar. Meanwhile Waukegan, with its mostly minority student body, is struggling. At one school, the band is forced to practice in a hallway, and as many as 28 students share a single computer. [For more of this...

What’s the last conversation you had with a police officer? Chances are it wasn’t about the weather. Or your favorite local cover band. Or their kid’s youth soccer game. Chance are … it was more stressful than not. All that’s about to change, if Sergeant Chis Cognac has anything to say about it. Operating under some simple guidelines (“no speeches, no agenda”), the co-founder of Coffee With a Cop has set out to shift the timbre of police-citizen interactions. “You can talk about crime or you...

[Ed. note: This is cross-posted from the ACEs in Education group, where Leisa Irwin is the community editor. If you want more information about trauma-informed schools, please join the ACEs in Education group.] I recently wrote a blog post about how to take the first step in creating a trauma informed care model (TIC) in your school. The first step, Establishing a Baseline, is necessary because it fuels future steps in the process. In the blog post "Is Your School Ready to be Trauma Informed...

Check out NPR's interactive app exploring mental health in public schools. http://apps.npr.org/mental-health/

Every Monday morning at Harvie Elementary School, in Henrico County, Va., Brett Welch stands outside her office door as kids file in. "The first thing I'm looking for are the faces," says Welch, a school counselor. She's searching for hints of fear, pain or anger. "Maybe there was a domestic incident at the house that weekend," says Welch. "That's reality for a lot of our kids." And a reality for a lot of kids in the U.S. While it's difficult to get an exact number, researchers estimate that...

Juvenile justice reform advocates can spread their message further if they carefully guide their audience to an understanding of adolescent development and the justice system, researchers say. The key is to reframe the issue of reform so that the public does not leap to conclusions about a broken system but instead thinks about how it can be improved. “If advocates can make that subtle shift, they’ll build a much bigger constituency,” said Julie Sweetland, vice president for strategy and...

More than 40 million American adults — almost 20 percent of the adult American population — will deal with mental illness this year. Yet mental health (of the citizens, not the candidates) has not been an issue in the presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton tried to change that last week, announcing a plan that offers hope for improving mental health research, diagnosis and treatment. Central to Mrs. Clinton’s plan is the integration of physical and mental health care and reducing the stigma...

Reactions to a dean’s letter against shielding students from controversial or offensive ideas To the Editor: Re “University of Chicago Rebels Against Moves to Stifle Speech” (front page, Aug. 27): To those academics who oppose content warnings in the classroom: We are not seeking to diminish your freedom of expression. We do not want to limit in any way your conversations or hinder the dialogues in which you might engage. All we ask for is the courtesy of a chance for our peers to brace...

Philadelphia — First you get your coat. I don’t care if you don’t remember where you left it, you find it. If there was a lot of blood you ask someone to go quickly to the basement to get you a new set of scrubs. You put on your coat and you go into the bathroom. You look in the mirror and you say it. You use the mother’s name and you use her child’s name. You may not adjust this part in any way. I will show you: If it were my mother you would say, “Mrs. Rosenberg. I have terrible, terrible...

"I couldn't really relate to that," Peter Robinson said of his fellow inmate. "I know what loss feels like, though." Like the other prisoner, Robinson struggles with mental illness; he has bipolar disorder and depression. The men talked for a long time. They came to focus on the message of the Serenity Prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. "The things I can't, you've just got to...