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The lowest of 31 grades issued in the  2016 California Children's Report Card released on Wednesday was for dealing with the effects of childhood trauma. In Children Now's biennial assessment of the status of California kids, researchers gave the state a "D-" for how it deals with childhood trauma. The report contends that children who experience traumatic problems such as abuse, neglect and witnessing violence at home can suffer serious long-term consequences, including health...

The calm and sometimes curt-sounding voices on the other end of 911 calls are often choking back tears. A little over a month ago, 911 call-taker Erin Falkenberg clicked on one of the nine computer screens in front of her at MedStar’s communications center and answered the hardest call she had ever taken. Through her headset, she heard a man in his 60s say that he was in his bedroom and was having difficulty breathing. The computer screen prompted Falkenberg to ask more questions, but...

A merica’s prisons have become warehouses for the severely mentally ill. Under the guise of punishing criminality, these inmates may be subject to cruelty from corrections staff, physical constraint up to and including lockdown or solitary confinement, and shocking physical and sexual abuse from other prisoners. They may receive inadequate treatment and poor supervision, and many will commit suicide while in prison. [For more of this story, written by Dahlia Lithwick, go...

Michael Nash’s 30-year career as a jurist has mostly been focused on trying to make life better for Los Angeles County’s children. He is widely credited by lawyers, child advocates and other judges as having measurably improved the juvenile courts in Los Angeles, where he spent two decades serving alternately as the presiding judge of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court and supervising judge of the Juvenile Dependency Court — the latter oversees the fate of Los Angeles foster...

Here’s the problem. Since you are reading this on ACES Connections, you are likely not the type of person who questions ACES. Like me, when you first heard about ACES, you shouted “Eureka!” or felt the heavens open up or maybe simply thought “Well, that makes sense.” Writing this blog, I’m preaching to the choir.  After all, there is so much scientific evidence to support ACES, doesn’t everyone believe it? Well, working in Public Health...

Legislation to replace the 14 year-old No Child Left Behind law—The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) signed by President Obama on Dec. 10—was widely praised by the administration, legislators of both parties in the House and Senate, and the organizations concerned about education policy from the NEA to the Education Trust. The consensus is that the bill is not perfect but provides a needed recalibration of federal authority over the states in education policy while protecting...

In December, a hung jury resulted in a mistrial in the Freddie Gray case. The death of the 25-year-old Baltimore black man while in police custody , and the protests that followed, brought to light the long history of strained police-community relations in the city’s highly segregated, very poor neighborhoods. Poor black kids growing up in Baltimore’s high-poverty neighborhoods are least likely to escape their circumstances compared to other U.S. cities, according to research...

On a typical morning, the first to wake is 6-month-old Nathaniel. He doesn’t always sleep through the night, so by the time his mother, Cierra Thomas, sits up in the twin bed she shares with her husband, Tony Gardner, she’s already dreading the day. “I’m mad that I woke up here,” she says. “Here” is the Gardner family’s room in a 135-bed shelter for homeless families. Their space, bright and painted beige, is the size of a modest kitchen.

The federal government has announced a $157 million project to help hospitals and doctors link Medicare and Medicaid patients to needed social services that sometimes have a bigger impact on their health than medical interventions. Public health experts have known for decades that even with medical care easily available, patients are often limited in their ability to get better or maintain good health if they lack stable housing, access to healthy food, or the ability to get to and from...

It was 5 a.m.—right before I was due to rise, dress, get my two children ready to go to church—and tears began to stream down my face. I was struck by the irony of my emotion: Seven years before, I’d been crying because I thought I had a serious illness and could not have children. This morning, I was crying because of my children: in particular, my boy child, about whom I was desperately worried, unsure how to help him navigate the everyday world of school as an...

The U.K. government is so tired of waiting on private developers to build new homes that it’s going to build its own. Faced with a nationwide housing crisis, Britain just earmarked £1.2 billion to directly commission 30,000 affordable new homes on brownfield sites by 2020, part of a target of 200,000 new homes in total. To speed things up, the first five new projects will be built on government land—ex-military sites, a goods yard, and a former hospital—in Southeast...

As the days get shorter, first grade teacher Esmeralda Jimnez watches the dimming afternoon sky outside her classroom window the way her pupils watch the clock at dismissal time. The studio apartment Jimnez rents for $1,783 a month, or 43 percent of her salary, is located in one of San Francisco’s sketchiest neighborhoods. Getting home involves running a gauntlet of feces-strewn sidewalks, popping crack pipes, discarded needles and menacing comments — daily irritants that become...