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By Al Donato, June 30, 2020, Huff Post. Every time Asante Haughton leaves his home, he sees someone in distress. For the Jamaican-born mental health advocate , encountering a person experiencing homelessness going through a bad mental health episode in public happens often in his Toronto neighbourhood. What’s also common, Haughton said, is seeing them become victims when police get involved. “People get tackled to the ground, hogtied, choked out and beat up because someone called the police...

By Michael Burke, EdSource, July 1, 2020 Los Angeles Unified will cut $25 million from its school police, reducing the department’s budget by more than one-third following several weeks of protests from Black students and activists who have called on the district to reform its police force. The district’s school board voted 4-3 late Tuesday to make the cuts, which will take effect immediately in L.A. Unified’s 2020-21 budget and result in the layoffs of 65 officers, in addition to...

By Betty Marquez Rosales, EdSource, July 1, 2020 With reduced work hours and a baby on the way, Maraya Bermudez stocks up on groceries for the week at the food pantry on her community college campus. She frequented the Fullerton College food pantry sparingly during the school year, but she now goes every week to pick up bags that often include rice, beans, vegetables, fruits, milk and snacks. A former foster youth, she has also been eligible for debit cards from her college that she can use...

By Clyde W. Yancy, MD, MSc 1 , JAMA. Published June 30, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.12532 E choes of “medicine as the noble profession” continue to resonate, now 35 years since my legendary Chair of Medicine imbued me with this guiding ethos. Nobility in medicine is not obsolete; the selflessness, courage, self-sacrifice, and altruism on gallant display in the response to COVID-19 reassures that at its core, this ethic of egalitarian service remains intact and deeply established in the DNA...

Resilient Georgia recently presented a roundtable discussion, featuring a distinguished panel of professionals, on the trauma associated with racism and racial discrimination, as part of the Mental Fitness for Resilience Campaign. The distinguished panel for this Georgia Public Broadcasting production included Dr. Patrice Harris, MD, MA, psychiatrist and the first African-American woman to be elected president of the American Medical Association; Dr. Terri McFadden, a General Pediatrician...

By Jillian Wilson, 07/01/2020 05:45am EDT on HuffPost.com In mental health training and treatment, examining the impact of racism on brains and bodies is largely uncharted territory. And while, in recent years, clinicians who advocate for the study of race-based trauma have made strides in promoting this work, most mental health programs still do not offer official training around racial trauma — a debilitating effect of racism and discrimination. Racial trauma comprises the mental and...

Save a Warrior, ACE SCORES and ACA/ACoA: Save a Warrior is the only Military and First Responder Services Organization tying ACE Scores to ACA orientation/participation as a cost-free, peer-to-peer, community-based-resiliency-model for achieving sustained recovery from “Complex PTS” which includes family of origin Trauma and adult Trauma (including Combat Trauma, First Responder “Life on the Streets”, Moral Injury, Survivor Guilt and Post Traumatic Stress). There is no single cause of...

By Alex Wittenberg June 25, 2020, 1:55 PM EDT on Bloomberg CityLab Two years ago, when the U.S. Treasury Department outlined how its new “Opportunity Zones” program would work , many experts were skeptical. Touted as a tax incentive designed to spur investment in low-income communities and help remedy the unequal pace of regional economic development, the program looked to some like another tax break for the wealthy; others feared it would just underwrite big projects in gentrifying...

2020 State Trends in Child Well-Being By the Annie E. Casey Foundation on June 22, 2020 The 31st edition of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's KIDS COUNT® Data Book describes how children across the United States were faring before the coronavirus pandemic began. This year’s publication continues to deliver the Foundation’s annual state rankings and the latest available data on child well-being. It also identifies multi-year trends — comparing statistics from 2010 to 2018. As always,...

Article by Michael Burke and Yuxuan Xie in EdSource, June 30th, 2020 Each morning before Chengbao Shang leaves for school in Guangzhou, China, his parents take the 7-year-old’s temperature and send the results to his teacher using a program on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media platform. It’s the same for every student in this city of more than 15 million. Chengbao’s father then drives him to school and drops him off 20 yards away from the campus. Chengbao, a first-grade student, gets...

By Helen Lewis of The Atlantic, June 30th, 2020 Boris Johnson loves to dress up—admittedly not an unusual pastime among alumni of Britain’s most exclusive schools. But his specific kink is looking like a builder, in a hard hat and bright high-visibility jacket. Yesterday, the British prime minister filmed a wobbly video that featured himself decked out in Day-Glo yellow at a London school, laying the groundwork for his “new deal” on infrastructure . For a set-piece speech today, his lectern...

School nurses have been industrious during COVID-19, using innovative skills to do one of the things we do best, providing information for our families. Everyone's health literacy has been tested through the pandemic. The messaging from our most trusted institutions like the CDC has been confusing and ever-changing. As states have released vague return to school guidelines, it is clear that the details for keeping our students and staff safe will depend on each school district to create...