Tagged With "Philadelphia ACE Task Force"

School police will no longer patrol city public school halls come September. Instead, “school safety officers” in less severe uniforms and with different job descriptions will be stationed throughout the Philadelphia School District. The move comes amid local and national pushes to remove police from schools. A handful of big-city districts, including those in Minneapolis, Denver, Seattle, and Oakland, have severed or backed away from relationships with police departments in the wake of the...

Ayana Bradshaw, MPH is the Administrative Director for the Center for Injury Research and Prevention (CIRP) and the Violence Prevention Initiative (VPI) at The Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. In this capacity she oversees all financial, administrative, operational, managerial, human resources and strategic planning components of the Center. Ms. Bradshaw has over 20 years of experience in multiple facets of public health, including but not limited to developing community health...

July 27, 2020 As a companion to Governor Tom Wolf’s multi-agency effort and anti-stigma initiative, Reach Out PA: Your Mental Health Matters, the Office of Advocacy and Reform (OAR) is releasing the “Trauma-Informed PA” plan to guide the commonwealth and service providers statewide on what it means to be trauma-informed and healing-centered in PA. This plan is the result of four months of work from OAR and the Trauma-Informed PA Think Tank, formed in February. The think tank was made up of...

The March meeting of the New Jersey Education Association’s ACEs Task Force opened without an agenda. It was a virtual gathering with more than 50 people—educators, social workers, professionals in pediatrics, juvenile justice and child abuse prevention. The pandemic had landed emphatically close to home, with a governor’s order to close all schools on March 18, and participants were grappling with what that meant for their students, their families and themselves. So ACEs Task Force co-chair...

Five years of convening Newark’s ACE Impact Team has taught Keri Logosso-Misurell a crucial lesson: Fight the urge to reinvent the wheel.

When students came to class in person, the private St. Malachy School in North Philadelphia was equipped with a robust emotional support program to help kids deal with trauma. The 11th and Thompson building offered its 275 students access to a space called the Peace Room. It was stocked with bean bag chairs, books, music, snacks — even an elliptical, in case they needed to get some energy out. There were two full-time staffers working the room at all times, one of whom is a counselor. When...

After a shooting at a historic Baltimore high school in February 2019—a 25-year-old man, angry about the school’s treatment of his sister, who was a student there, shot a special education assistant with a Smith and Wesson handgun—conversation in the city centered on whether school resource officers should be armed. Students said that was the wrong question. When City Council’s education and youth committee, chaired by council member Zeke Cohen, held hearings on school violence following the...

The third annual gathering of Minnesota ACEs collaboratives—“Growing Resilient Communities: Collaboratives Addressing ACEs”—began with a sober recitation of inequities: We acknowledge that the wealth of this country was built on stolen land and with enslaved and underpaid labor of African American, Native, and Immigrant people…We acknowledge that the recent global uprising, which was sparked by the murder of George Floyd right here in Minnesota, paired with the COVID-19 pandemic, makes for a...

The deaths of several New Mexico children in recent years—a 13-year-old whose father was accused of fatally torturing him; an eight-year-old who was kicked to death by her mother; a girl raped, strangled and stabbed by her mother’s boyfriend the night before her 10th birthday—drew horror, outrage and scrutiny of the state’s child welfare system. Those incidents drove child welfare and public health specialists Katherine Ortega Courtney and Dominic Cappello to examine the data. Cappello and...

Seven years ago, trying to recover from the death of her daughter, Brenda Mosley was introduced to the concept of trauma-informed care. “I was in a state of grief, darkness and despair,” she says. Then she began a three-year, trauma-informed program offered by an organization in her neighborhood of Kensington, Philadelphia, the New Kensington Community Development Corporation (NKCDC). “It was 10 women and we were introduced to all the models of trauma-informed care,” Mosley recalls. “I was...