GK note: This article below was shared by Andrew Anastasia from Harper College in Illinois who is part of a campus group to figure out how to address ACEs at Harper College. This article below, from 2016, describes findings from a survey of ACEs among college students in Universities in Minnesota. IT would be great to contact folks in MINN to see what else has happened since 2016!
Jeremiah Dean had a tough childhood. He grew up without a father around. He was bullied. He struggled in school. To get a new start, his mother moved them out of north Minneapolis to the suburbs when he was around 11 years old.
"So we move into a more suburban area but we're still poor, so we're confined on where we can live and the apartment complex we moved into was just saturated with meth," he said. "And the kids I started to hang out with, their brothers either made it, or their fathers. It just became the thing to do."
By the time he turned 16, he had dropped out of high school and began a years-long struggle with drugs. In 2007 he was arrested. It was a wake up call that started a journey toward getting clean. Someone with the College of St. Scholastica urged him to consider college and he enrolled.
"And I failed everything my first semester and dropped out, because again, I'm a poor reader. I had no idea how to write academically. I've got 19-year-old students running circles around me," he said. "I'm 33, 32 at this time. And I just felt completely inadequate."
But in that dark moment he heard something unfamiliar.
"I explained this to them in an exiting interview, and they were like, 'You know Jeremiah, you haven't failed anything. It was us who failed you,'" Dean recalled. "And that was very powerful to me because it was almost the first time that I wasn't blamed for my failures."
In an effort to better understand what students like Dean have been through at colleges across the state, the University of Minnesota added questions about adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, to a health survey it sends to students at 17 public and private schools in the state.
To read or listen to the full report go HERE
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