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Washington state legislator Tana Senn, has introduced the “Summer Step-Up Act” to improve social-emotional learning throughout the calendar year to reduce kids' summer learning loss.

A Utah lawmaker has introduced HCR10 , a resolution encouraging Utah state agencies to become aware of and identify Adverse Childhood Experiences in the children and adults that they serve. The bill also details the impact of ACEs on survivors, and the importance of awareness on our ability to address trauma. The bill was drafted by the Utah Essentials for Childhood effort The Utah Coalition for Protecting Childhood (UCPC) and passed unanimously out of committee yesterday. The legislation...

Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner and Diana Rauner, President of Ounce of Prevention Fund _____________________________________________ Consistent with being the first state to adopt standards for social emotional learning (SEL) in the country, Illinois recently passed legislation (SB 565, Public Act 99-0927 ) to require social and emotional screenings for children as part of the their school entry examinations. Governor Rauner (R) signed the bill on January 20. It goes into effect June 1 of...

The Iowa ACEs Advocacy Coalition kicked off the Iowa legislative session with efforts to promote a Resilient Iowa. With a growing advocacy coalition of community based organizations, associations, advocacy groups, philanthropy and business, the group advances joint policy priorities to prevent ACEs and promote resiliency and trauma-informed care. Last week, the coalition held its first advocacy day at the Iowa Capitol, educating elected officials on Iowa ACEs data. The group also promoted an...

A summit is underway this week to develop ways to reduce the number of mentally ill people in county jails. Sheriffs, judges, elected officials, and mental health professionals from 53 countie s are in Sacramento this week. Department of Justice surveys show nearly two-thirds of people in jail have a mental illness. The Stepping Up Initiative is hosting the summit. It was started in 2015 and now counts about 320 counties nationwide as partners in the effort. To read more of Bob Moffitt's...

Inspired by the way police departments mapped crime data to detect “hot spots,” family physician Dr. Jeffrey Brenner dug into ambulance records and emergency department data to show how high-cost patients were shuttling between city hospitals. “In America, we’re medicalizing social problems and we’re criminalizing social problems, and we’re wasting huge amounts of public resources,” Brenner said. “We have the wrong tools to solve the wrong problem.” To steer patients away from expensive...

The Administration for Children and Families, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administrations, the Administration for Community Living, the Offices of the Assistant Secretary for Health and the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at HHS have worked together to develop this Guide to Trauma-Informed Human Services. The guide is intended to provide an introduction to the topic of trauma, a discussion of why understanding and addressing trauma is important for human...

Legislative sessions are opening in the 50 states, the District of Columbia and the territories—most in January—and will be addressing a myriad of issues from budgets, job growth, health care, immigration, the opioid epidemic, police-community relations, education and others ( featured in the State Legislatures Magazine ). Many of these proposals will impact how well communities will prosper and thrive, fewer will impact childhood adversity directly, and an even smaller number will...

I found this document by Futures Without Violence to be a useful resource. From the forward: The health care system plays an important role both in identifying children who may be exposed to extreme adversity and violence, currently and in the past, and in providing the evidence-based interventions that can help children heal from trauma and prevent health conditions and other poor outcomes associated with trauma and ACEs. The health care system is also central in supporting the greatest...

People from across sectors filled the conference room on Wilmington University’s Dover Campus, Wednesday, December 7, to hear the findings of the Delaware Household Health Survey Data, which included ACEs data from across Delaware. Dr. Leslie Brower, who chairs Trauma Matters Delaware, opened the briefing by welcoming attendees and thanking partner organizations and funders. DPHI Executive Director Francine Axler and Laurel Jones, DPHI project assistant, presented the findings which included...

This Compendium is designed to help state and local policymakers, as well as school-level personnel and other education stakeholders, better understand the current school discipline practices in our country. It provides information on school discipline laws and administrative regulations for each of the 50 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands effective as of March 2016. (See Notes &...

SACRAMENTO – Farmworkers in the nation’s largest agricultural state will be entitled to the same overtime pay as most other hourly workers under a law that California Gov. Jerry Brown said Monday he had signed. The new law, which will be phased in beginning in 2019, is the first of its kind in the nation to end the 80-year-old practice of applying separate labor rules to agricultural laborers. California employers currently must pay time-and-a half to farmworkers after 10 hours in a day or...