June 2016

Baltimore, Maryland - Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers have found that increases in unemployment in California during the Great Recession were associated with an increased risk for weight gain among the state's 1.7 million public school students, suggesting that economic troubles could have long-term health consequences for children. The researchers, publishing online June 1 in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, say that for every one percentage...

Closing the so-called achievement gap between poor inner-city children and their more affluent suburban counterparts is among the biggest challenges for education reformers. The success of some schools’ efforts suggests that meditation might significantly improve children’s school performance – and help close that gap. In 2007, James Dierke, then the principal of the Visitacion Valley Middle School in a troubled neighborhood in San Francisco, was determined to improve both the quality of...

For years, Gov. Jerry Brown has resisted efforts to spend more money to build affordable housing. As part of his revised budget released Friday , Brown announced what he said was a better solution: making it easier to build homes for low-income residents. In a new package of legislation, Brown is proposing to streamline the permitting process for developers building affordable homes. “Hopefully, the supply is going to bring down the cost,” Brown said. “Otherwise, through subsidies and...

Putting a cold financial price tag on the impact of school discipline practices, researchers have calculated that a 10th-grade California student who drops out because of suspension could end up costing the public $755,000 in lost tax revenue and increased health care and criminal justice expenses over the life of the student, according to a report released Thursday by the UCLA Center for Civil Rights Remedies. The researchers amalgamated decades of studies to produce what they said was the...

What if you spent years in a job gaining valuable experience and honing useful skills, yet every interview or job lead is a dead end? That's the unfortunate reality for many of today's veterans in Orange County. According to a report by the University of Southern California School of Social Work, more than 60 percent of Orange County veterans believe employers don't understand or value their skills, almost 30 percent of post-9/11 vets are unemployed, and three-quarters earn below the...

For years, Gov. Jerry Brown has resisted efforts to spend more money to build affordable housing. As part of his revised budget released Friday , Brown announced what he said was a better solution: making it easier to build homes for low-income residents. In a new package of legislation, Brown is proposing to streamline the permitting process for developers building affordable homes. “Hopefully, the supply is going to bring down the cost,” Brown said. “Otherwise, through subsidies and...