Tagged With "Double up SNAP"
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Simmons: Mental health scientists offer hope after sobering report on state's infants and toddlers
Data is being collected to support the theory that where a child grows up can have a large impact on the developing brain. Friday at the Stillwater Public Library, childhood development experts weighed in on the 2019 State of Babies report (stateofbabies.org) that graded each state, and showed a lot of room to grow for Oklahoma’s rural communities. Room to grow was a euphemism the program used to mean that things could be a lot better for infants and toddlers in Oklahoma. Resilient Payne...
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Skene: Elayn Hunt inmates learn about impacts of childhood trauma, applying research to their own lives
Ryan Crotwell's memories of growing up in French Settlement are filled with mental snapshots of abuse at the hands of his alcoholic father. First he remembers kneeling on rice. Then the whippings started — "switches, belts, whatever was within reach." Crotwell, 34, recalls acting out in school and receiving brutal punishments at home. He was institutionalized for psychiatric treatment twice before his 10th birthday and diagnosed with various psychological conditions including attention...
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Slipke: Oklahoma City police, school district team up to help children exposed to trauma
Oklahoma City school officials and police have teamed up to help students who are exposed to trauma through a new initiative called Handle with Care. It's a simple idea, but one that they hope will have a big impact on the lives of local students. When police officers encounter a child who has experienced a traumatic situation, such as domestic violence, a car wreck or the arrest of a parent, they send an email to the school district with the child's name and age or school so school...
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12 Myths of the Science of ACEs
The two biggest myths about ACEs science are: MYTH #1 — That it’s just about the 10 ACEs in the ACE Study — the CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study . It’s about sooooo much more than that. MYTH #2 — And that it’s just about ACEs…adverse childhood experiences. These two myths are intertwined. The ACE Study issued the first of its 70+ publications in 1998, and for many people it was the lightning bolt, the grand “aha” moment, the unexpected doorway into a blazing new...
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30 people can end ACEs in your county. Why aren’t they?
No, we don’t need the president nor congress. We do need the following people in your county to stop business as usual and focus on preventing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). City mayors City counselors County commissioners School board members These local elected leaders—many of them your neighbors and colleagues—have the capacity to collectively understand the emotional and financial costs of ACEs and trauma. We can’t have family-friendly cities and counties while we live in an...
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4 years after integrating ACEs science, Pueblo, CO clinic improves services for families; cuts ER costs, doctor stress
Four years ago, Dr. Leslie Dempsey would never have talked about ACEs — adverse childhood experiences — with her patients. Now ACEs is a common topic. “Just as I don’t feel awkward asking someone if they smoke or do intravenous drugs, I don’t really feel awkward talking about their childhood traumas in a way that it relates to their health. It’s just integrated into obtaining background and social history,” she says. Dr. Leslie Dempsey Dempsey is a physician in obstetrics who oversees a team...
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ACEs high in Oklahoma [Examiner-Enterprise.com]
A study ranks Oklahoma as one of the worst states in the nation for adverse childhood experiences, Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy CEO Joe Dorman said Wednesday, and he said he hopes his organization can reverse that trend. Dorman spoke during the Wednesday lunch meeting of the Kiwanis Club of Bartlesville at the Bartlesville Community Center. The former state legislator and 2014 Democratic candidate for governor, began his tenure as CEO of the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy in...
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ACEs Science in Education: The Next Big Challenge is Systems Change #ACEsCon2018
One of the first sessions of the 2018 ACEs Conference: Action to Access discussed the barriers and opportunities for increasing access in the field of education. The main question was: "How can one achieve systematic changes within the field of education?" The session was moderated by Michelle Flowers, a passionate advocate, and the principal of Kinney High in Rancho Cordova, CA, which is part of the Folsom Cordova Unified School District. It included a dynamic and diverse panel of education...
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An imperative for those in "towers" to connect with the realities of trauma in schools
Boosting SEL in K-12's "Ivory Towers" Educational Leadership October 2018 | Volume 76 | Number 2 The Promise of Social-Emotional Learning Those of us in administration must lift our "social awareness" by getting closer to schools and the people inside them. The superintendent's leadership team for the district where I was working had just finished its Monday morning meeting. One member of that team stopped as he passed by my cubicle to view the large poster I'd recently hung up. It displayed...
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Anya Kamenetz: How The Science Of Learning Is Catching Up To Mr. Rogers
Editor's note on Aug. 8, 2018: This piece has been substantially updated from a version published in 2014. A solemn little boy with a bowl haircut is telling Mr. Rogers that his pet got hit by a car. More precisely, he's confiding this to Daniel Striped Tiger, the hand puppet that, Rogers' wife, Joanne, says, "pretty much was Fred." "That's scary," says Daniel/Fred. He asks for a hug. The boy hugs the tiger. Not a dry eye in the house. That scene is from Won't You Be My Neighbor , the hit...
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Balancing Gravity and Grace
Since we are all caught in the unpredictable, uncontrollable environment of Covid 19 right now, we are all experiencing trauma at one level or another. Some are experiencing much more fear, grief, anxiety, helplessness and overwhelming sense of vulnerability and loss of control. Others are just experiencing the creation of a work space at home, meeting co-workers virtually, and remaining at home as much as possible from obligation more than fear. Regardless of what level of stress you are...
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Belew: Oklahoma First Lady stops in Duncan, focuses on preventing adverse childhood experiences through tour and film screening
“The child may not remember but the body remembers.” That was the key saying behind the “Resilience: The Biology of Stress and the Science of Hope” film screening Thursday, Jan. 16 when First Lady Sarah Stitt brought the Hope Rising Tour to Duncan in an effort to educate and help prevent Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) plaguing youth in the state. “Resilience” focuses on the concept of ACEs, which is now understood to be a leading cause of “everything from heart disease and cancer to...
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Bitterman: Coronavirus in Oklahoma: Teacher parades let students, educators connect from a distance
Teachers from schools around the Oklahoma City metro area have been lining up their cars in caravans and parading through their students’ neighborhoods this week to show their students how much they care about them. The teachers have written on their windows with car paint and taped on hand-written signs with messages of how much they love and miss their students. “We miss y’all,” read a sign held by one teacher Wednesday in Reagan Elementary's parade in Norman. The caravans have snaked down...
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Brene Brown: Why Experiencing Joy and Pain in a Group Is So Powerful
Today, our culture is in crisis. Many people have retreated to their ideological bunkers to hate from afar, dehumanizing others rather than risk having real, meaningful conversations across their differences. How will we find our way back to each other? It’s not by staying in our factions and echo chambers, pressured to conform to whatever viewpoints and ways of being are acceptable to our political and social groups. Instead, it will take a willingness to share our authentic stories,...
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Buchman: House Panel Takes Up Treatment of Childhood Trauma
WASHINGTON (CN) – During its first-ever hearing on the subject, the House Oversight Committee met Thursday with experts and survivors of childhood trauma, a day after an immigrant mother gave emotional testimony about the death of her baby daughter following their stay at a detention center. Thursday’s hearing comes on the heels of testimony delivered by Yazmin Juarez, the mother of a 19-month-old girl who died after 20 days in detention at a facility in Texas. Her story detailed the...
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Building Resilient, Self-Healing Communities
An exciting and somewhat logical outgrowth that has followed the Resilience documentary screenings sponsored by the Potts Family Foundation has been the creation of multidisciplinary teams formed to think about and take next steps within their communities. Led by Resilient Payne County, formed over two years ago, other communities are following a similar path in bringing key leaders together to assess their community’s strengths and define community needs around mitigating and preventing the...
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Child Mind Institute: Not All Attention Problems Are ADHD
Trouble paying attention is often first identified by a teacher who notices that a student seems more easily distracted than most other kids his age. Maybe the child takes an unusually long time to finish schoolwork in class. Maybe when the teacher calls on him, he doesn’t seem to have been following the lesson. Maybe he seems to tune out when instructions are given, or forget what he’s supposed to be doing. Maybe homework assignments often go missing. While all children, especially those...
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Compassion Fatigue: Resiliency and Self Care
Compassion Fatigue: Resiliency and Self-Care Every day we read about people all over the world who experience and endure traumatic life events such as natural and man-made disasters, violence, abuse, and other overwhelming adverse life situations. These occurrences are all too common. Research indicates that up to 60 percent of the U.S. population will experience a traumatic event during their lifetime and some experience multiple traumas first-hand. Traumatic exposure has been implicated as...
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Connecting Childhood Trauma, attachment, home-based services
Connecting childhood trauma, attachment, home-based services A nurturing bonding between infants and the primary caregivers (typically parents) or early attachment has a tremendous impact on the health and well-being of children. The most important stage for development of an infant’s brain is at the beginning of life in utero and first couple years of life. In the first three years of life, the growth of the brain is amazingly rapid with an estimated rate of 700-1000 synapse connections per...
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Creating hope from adverse childhood experiences
There is no doubt that the landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences study by Anda and Felitti has shifted the landscape of how we think about childhood. The ACEs study established the link between early adverse experiences and later negative outcomes. A brief overview of the key areas of early adversity included in the ACEs study are: (1) physical abuse, (2) sexual abuse, (4) physical neglect, (5) emotional neglect, (6) having a parent with a mental illness, (7) having a parent with substance...
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D. D. Kirkland School features innovation, partnerships
A t the invitation of an early education expert with the Potts Family Foundation , I attended the Aug. 14 D.D. Kirkland Early Childhood Center Screening Day and Meet the Teacher event. I should add that this retired high school teacher did not grasp the importance of high-quality pre-K until I was schooled by Ray Potts (as well as John Rex) during MAPS for Kids. Back then, there were still some doubts as to the benefits of pre-K and full-service community schools like D.D. Kirkland. I should...
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Dorman: Reducing childhood trauma may affect addiction, incarceration rates [JournalRecord.com]
With the upcoming task force formed by Senate Bill 1517, I am confident Oklahoma has taken a major step forward in overcoming the high rate of adverse childhood experiences that affects our residents. For those of you not familiar with ACEs, this is the study of childhood trauma and the associated health-related conditions that follow into adulthood. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, childhood experiences, both positive and negative, have a tremendous impact on...
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DR. ROBERT BLOCK: A pediatrician’s perspective on ACEs, resilience
As an academic and clinical pediatrician with over 40 years of experience, I was impressed and amazed when I first heard Dr. Vince Felitti speak about his ground-breaking work on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), first published in 1998. For the last several years a multitude of professionals have been working on the clinical (practical) application of his work, and more have been learning about the genetics, brain chemistry, and other scientific explanations for his findings. The core...
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Dulaney: 'We had to discuss those things and go deep': Play aims to help Oklahoma children of inmates
NORMAN — The story of a convict and his dog unfolded on a Norman stage Tuesday as playwright and producer Peter Zhmutski directed actors, moved props and rewrote lines for “Marvin’s Shining Star,” a teleplay aimed at helping children of incarcerated parents. Filming of the play wraps up this week and once production is finished, creators hope to distribute it throughout Oklahoma schools, along with the script, set design instructions, and follow-up questions for students so they can produce...
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Eger: Day 5: ACES: Breaking the cycle: 'Waking up was miserable'
The kids at Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore changed Kristin Atchley as an education professional. Tragedy there changed her as a person. Today, Atchley uses what she learned and lived through to teach others about the impact of chronic stressors on growing kids and how trauma rewires our brains. “I had a fully-developed brain as a 30-year-old. I knew I could get help and get through. Kids don’t always understand that,” she said. Atchley didn’t have the personal or professional...
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Emig: Day 6: ACES: Breaking the cycle: How a Tulsa realtor became Mama Linda to foster children
Linda Vincent lets you know straight away: Being a foster parent can be terrifying. “Ter-ri-fy-ing,” she says for emphasis. “My kids come into my home and I see behaviors that would blow other people’s minds. They call them ‘trauma rages’ sometimes.” Foster children tend to have encountered trauma. They tend to have high ACE scores. They typically haven’t encountered stabilizers in their lives. Then they come into the lives of foster parents. They come into lives like Vincent’s. “I’ve...
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Re: The Power of Hope to Mitigate Vicarious Trauma and Burnout
Thank you for posting this Casey! We have several groups now in Oklahoma working with Chan and many more in line! We love the Science of Hope and are incorporating it into our Resilience documentary showings and our work with the 20 Self-Healing Community teams.
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100% Community - Let’s Do It!
I have been following the work of Katherine Ortega Courtney and Dominic Cappello since they wrote the book Anna, Age Eight in late 2017. They are honest in their assessment of the systemic problems in most of our state agency networks and too frequent failures to protect children and families as a result of those breakdowns. What I love most is they are solution oriented and offer fairly simple solutions. The caveat to that is these solutions require a huge paradigm shift - bigger for some...
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2020 State of Babies & 2020 KIDS COUNT Databook
The State of Babies Yearbook is a national and state resource developed by ZERO TO THREE to tell the story of America’s babies through key indicators in the domains infants and toddlers need to thrive: Good Health , Strong Families , and Positive Early Learning Experiences . The State of Babies Yearbook , an initiative of Think Babies ™, provides policymakers and advocates with national and state-level data to help them advance policies to improve the lives of babies and families. Where...
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Offset trauma for students by promoting positive experiences [exclusive.multibriefs.com]
By Sheilamary Koch, Multibriefs: Exclusive, July 27, 2020 When Christina Bethell was little, she lived in a low-income housing complex in Los Angeles where her neighbor, a quiet lady the kids called Mrs. Raccoon, always had her door open for the neighborhood kids. Every Saturday she threw a little tea party with candy to celebrate any child with a birthday that week. Bethell fondly remembers the woman’s kindness as source of comfort during her challenging childhood. Dr. Bethell, now a...
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Blackmon: Physical Play with Dad Helps Kids Develop Self-Control, Says Study
A University of Cambridge study found that children who played with their fathers from an early age were more skilled at regulating their emotions and behaviors later in life. The University of Cambridge and the LEGO Foundation teamed up together for this study and analyzed close to 40 years of data. The goal of the research was to determine if there were significant differences between the ways that mothers and fathers play with their children. The results and findings were most likely a...
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Free viewing of "How Many ACEs Are You Holding?"
I was asked to offer a free viewing of our new documentary video on the topic of ACEs. Due to my limited knowledge of technology it took a minute to get this set up. Now we can announce: View “How Many ACEs Are You Holding?” for FREE! Use code ACES-FREE on October 13th, 2020 to see the entire video free . Use this link to view. Coupon will only work on the Vimeo rental page for How Many Aces are You Holding? , not the subscription page. This post will appear on the homepage of our website...
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Fugate: Opportunity [OK Representative Andy Fugate]
Each year the United States spends approximately $20 Billion to provide rental assistance to low-income families through Housing Choice Vouchers . What? You’ve never heard of Housing Choice Vouchers? Perhaps you know them by the more common name, Section 8 Housing. Under the law, this money can be spent in any neighborhood within a Housing Authority's jurisdiction. But most of the 2.2 million families using vouchers continue to live in high-poverty, low-opportunity neighborhoods. The...
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O’Donnell: Opening 'so many doors for families': COVID-19 underscores importance of wraparound care for new moms and children
For once, being a biracial, low income, Medicaid patient didn't work against Selina Martinez. In 2015, two weeks after giving birth at a Manhattan hospital, Martinez arrived at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx where she was diagnosed with salmonella. During a monthlong stay, hospital staff members learned times were tough for the new mom. She'd been getting psychiatric care since the stillbirth of her last child, her husband was recovering at home from pancreatic cancer treatment and a...
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Lesley: These Commonsense Measures Can Lift up America’s Children
Public discourse in this election year has largely ignored the plight of our nation’s children. Debates and position platforms have glossed over what the COVID-19 pandemic has meant for their stability and well-being. And despite a new study released last week finding that poverty has grown by six million people in the past three months, with circumstances worsening most for Black people and children, candidates and elected officials have remained largely silent. Even as the virus has...
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What I Learned From Presenting a Trauma-informed Class to Police Chiefs by Christopher Freeze
I'm pretty sure I learned as much or more about trauma-informed policing while presenting the class as did the police chiefs who attended. After not presenting at all during 2020, I was excited to be invited to present a block of instruction on Trauma-Informed Leadership for Police Chiefs at the Mississippi Association of Chiefs of Police 2021 Winter Conference. There were about 50 chiefs in attendance on January 14, 2021, and while we all had to deal with the COVID precautions, it was good...
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Ardmore Hosts Successful Documentary Screening & Discussion
The Potts Family Foundation through its Raising Resilient Oklahomans initiative partnered this past week with the Ardmore Behavioral Health Collaborative and Ardmore Literacy Leadership to host a very successful virtual screening and discussion of the award-winning documentary Resilience: The Biology of Stress & the Science of Hope. As we always do, the weekend screening period was followed by a moderated panel discussion of professionals, mostly local, who frequently work with children...
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Educators embrace trauma-informed instruction in fourth statewide summit
OKLAHOMA CITY (Feb. 16, 2021) – While many schools across the state were close d Monday due to winter weather, thousands of Oklahoma educators spent their snow y President’s Day learning how to recognize trauma in students and create teaching strategies to overcome stress and fear that can obstruct learning. The Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE) estimated up to 4,500 teachers, counselors and other school leaders attended its fourth statewide summit for trauma-informed instruction...
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Heal the Forest for the Tree
“ Trauma always happens within a context, and so does healing. To understand the impact of trauma means being acutely sensitive to the environment—to the conditions under which people grew up, to how they live today, and to the journeys they have taken along the way .” (Andrea Blanch, Beth Filson, and Darby Penney National Center for Trauma Informed Care guidebook) Creating an environment that exudes calm, safety, and compassion is a goal of trauma-informed systems. It is a profound paradigm...
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Why We Need to Build Trust in Our Neighborhoods by Christopher Freeze
At the heart of any healthy relationship is trust. We instinctively understand this fact. Yet, we sometimes allow our own insecurities, weaknesses, and selfishness to rob us of trust which, in turn, robs us of the joy and peace we could be experiencing with other people. There are resources available designed to help us strengthen personal relationships and to deal with broken relationships. In both instances, almost all of those resources place an emphasis on building or rebuilding trust.
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Re: Chaos Cycle
Here is a presentation that promotes a "Peer Support Group Model" as a pathway to individual and community stability.