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Despite a reversal of the Trump administration family separation policy, as of July 2018, more than 2000 children remain separated from their parents or legal guardians. 1 In an article published in JAMA, Howard A. Zucker, MD, JD, and Danielle Greene, DrPH, of the New York State Department of Health, suggest that child-parent separation during an already tumultuous and emotionally strenuous event may exert greater long-term physical and mental health effects on children than is currently...

Mt. Pleasant Public Schools are equipping their teachers with knowledge on how to engage students experiencing trauma. During their professional development days on Tuesday and Wednesday, the district had a presentation to become a trauma-informed school district. "We've begun a process across the district to educate our staff on how to work with students who have may have experienced or are experiencing traumatic situations," Community Education Director Kim Funnell said. [For more on this...

Early Childhood Australia (ECA) is rolling out a new program for educators — Early signals. First Responses. Funded by the NSW Domestic & Family Violence Innovation Fund the program will resource and support early childhood educators and carers to better recognise and respond to young children who have been exposed to or have experienced family violence. The focus of the Innovation Fund on long-term prevention and early intervention strategies is aimed at ensuring educators receive...

New Jersey's social workers help people with some of the worst situations, on some of their worst days. Maybe none more so than those in child protective services, who see families ripped apart by circumstances such as drugs and domestic violence. But what happens when it gets to be too much for the helpers? While resources exist for over-stressed and overwhelmed child protective service workers, they are not always readily available, experts say. In the best of circumstances, peer-to-peer...

There’s an old adage, “You can’t pour from an empty cup.” But as a paraprofessional in Chicago, my cup is almost drained. Each day, I provide academic, emotional, and behavioral support for over 200 students. The amount of mental and emotional energy it takes to calm a single student down, redirect or remove them from the class, and provide appropriate consequences is overwhelming — even with experience — when there are 11 other six-year-olds in a classroom that need my help. I look forward...

Months ago, inmates across the U.S. began planning a strike over prison conditions, including low or nonexistent wages. To start getting the word out, they didn’t target big news organizations. Instead, organizers posted about the imminent strikes to their own social-media followers. And they contacted publications with an activist bent, like Shadowproof, a press organization focused on marginalized communities, and the San Francisco Bay View, a black-liberation newspaper. They worried,...

Some American cities have spent months or years debating whether to open supervised injection facilities for drug users, and one big national voice finally weighed in this week. Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, argued in theNew York Times that supervised injection is dangerous and sites offering the service shouldn't operate in the United States. Supervised injection facilities are clinics where people can bring in drugs, such as heroin and cocaine, and use them under the...

WASHINGTON — Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is preparing new policies on campus sexual misconduct that would bolster the rights of students accused of assault, harassment or rape, reduce liability for institutions of higher education and encourage schools to provide more support for victims. The proposed rules, obtained by The New York Times, narrow the definition of sexual harassment, holding schools accountable only for formal complaints filed through proper authorities and for conduct...

On April 13, 2018, Emily Truitt, a dog groomer with a two-year old son, received a visitor at her doorstep. Responding to an accusation of neglect, an investigator with the Delaware Division of Family Services asked Truitt’s boyfriend for permission to enter their home while she was at work. This is a request millions of families receive each year, and though granting entry is not mandatory without a court order, many families — like Truitt’s — automatically comply. Shortly after the...

A nearly two-decade drought has drained the Colorado River, leaving regulators scrambling to protect the waterway, which provides water to 40 million people across seven states. Colorado officials are treating the situation as an emergency, the Aspen Times reports . But their efforts may come too late; the Bureau of Reclamation predicts a 57 percent chance that the river's largest reservoir will be too low to give each state its agreed-upon share by 2020, according to a Colorado Public Radio...

Early in the morning, probably as I pass through my last rapid eye movement cycle, I often suffer paralysis dreams. Those dreams predetermine my day since after them I awaken with a very painful lower abdomen and colon spasm that may last for several hours. The nightmares that I see during this strange time in my sleep, early in the morning, are usually related to being in school. There are three types of dreams: I am either in elementary school in Russia and our teacher is insulting me in...