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Learn4Life is taking an organization-wide approach to educational service delivery grounded in understanding trauma, its consequences and promoting healing and resilience. To help staff better understand the approach, training was recently conducted for Learn4Life leaders including teachers, counselors, and administrative staff. The training is designed to increase understanding of proactive, practical, trauma-informed approaches to create cultures of inclusivity. The goal is the have all...

We are very excited to introduce this new program at the Wexford / Missaukee Friend of the Court as our part of a larger scale initiative to build resilience in families and our community as a whole. As it relates to our clients here at FOC, our Gear Up program helps parents to identify separation and divorce as a common adverse childhood experience which can have lifelong negative affects throughout the lifespan. We hope parents will take away from it real tools they can use to minimize...

STOCKTON, Calif. — In California, known for decades as one of the nation’s most avid jailers, the trajectory of law and order is shifting. Through litigation, legislation and a series of ballot initiatives, the state’s prison population has dropped 25 percent over the past decade. The photographer Joseph Rodriguez has been documenting crime and punishment in California for years and recently focused his gaze on the migration home, in Stockton — a barren outpost in California’s Central...

Racism is an epidemic that is killing black Americans all across the country, regardless of their level of education or income, health professionals report. According to David Williams, a Harvard professor and leading researcher on race and health, more than 200 black Americans die every day, who would not have died if the health status of blacks and whites were equal. That’s the equivalent of a fully loaded passenger airline crashing every single day, Williams said in one lecture. [For more...

Educators nationwide are recognizing that early psychological traumas can have a huge impact on children's brain development and learning. Just how teachers and schools can support students affected by adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, is not quite a science. That's where Algonquin-based Community Unit District 300's new initiative called DREAM Academy -- for Dedicated Reinforcement, Engagement And Motivation -- comes in. [For more on this story by Madhu Krishnamurthy, go to...

"Our research shows that negative emotions that linger after even minor, daily stressors have important implications for our long-term physical health," says psychological scientist Kate Leger of the University of California, Irvine. "When most people think of the types of stressors that impact health, they think of the big things, major life events that severely impact their lives, such as the death of a loved one or getting divorced," Leger says. "But accumulating findings suggest that...

Two states are moving closer to legislation that would allow child welfare officials to immediately move newborns exposed to opioids toward adoption, an effort meant to address the growing number of children entering foster care due to neglect or abuse related to drug use. In Kentucky, a broader child welfare bill focused on family preservation also included a caveat to terminate parental rights unless a parent was willing to enroll in treatment. Arizona’s legislature has passed a bill that...

It was January 2006 and Josef Kirk Fischl was tucked away behind a 30-foot-high gray wall in C Block, one of Attica Correctional Facility's toughest cellblocks. He had already served more than 16 years on a 25-to-life bid for a murder he committed when he was 19. At the time, Fischl was sporting dreadlocks down his back. One day, filing out to the yard, he walked through a gauntlet of corrections officers holding wooden batons, their arms sleeved in tattoos—skulls, dragons, spider webs...

In July 1967 , when President Lyndon B. Johnson formed a commission to analyze the riots then engulfing several major American cities, the radical wing of the civil-rights movement eyed his appointees with grave skepticism. Not only did the 11-person commission abound with the most conventional of politicians—including its chairman, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner—but a mere two of them were black. Racial militants might have tolerated that paltry number of seats had they been occupied by...

Philadelphia’s newly minted district attorney, Larry Krasner, was meeting constituents in a packed church in West Philadelphia earlier this month to discuss his plans for the job. The meeting was unique in that it quickly revealed to community members what local civic leaders and officials have already learned about Krasner: He is making good on his promise to revolutionize the job of district attorney and, in the process, offering an extraordinary experiment in criminal justice reform at...

Even at MIT, no one’s been able to create a computer as powerful as the brain of a baby. “They’re better at doing this fast learning from one or two examples than any computer algorithm we have right now,” MIT graduate student Julia Leonard said. “That’s a big interest here — everyone’s like, ‘We want a computer to learn like a baby.’ ” Leonard was curious about how babies learn too, so she gathered up more than 200 to analyze their genius brains. Specifically, she was interested in studying...

Last week I returned to Amherst. It’s been years since I was there, the time we met. I was hoping that you’d show up again; I even looked for you, but you didn’t appear. I remember you proudly repped N.Y.C. during the few minutes we spoke, so I suspect you’d moved back or maybe you were busy or you didn’t know I was in town. I have a distinct memory of you in the signing line, saying nothing to anyone, intense. I assumed you were going to ask me to read a manuscript or help you find an...