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By EdSource, November 4, 2019 From Sonoma County to Simi Valley, fires forced hundreds of thousands of Californians out of their homes in October. In this week’s podcast, reporter Sydney Johnson shares what she found at evacuation centers in Santa Rosa and Petaluma, where she spoke with college students worried about how they will make up lost time. Also, with a big decline in out-of-school suspensions for disruptive behavior, some districts are looking at ways to transform how they handle...

By Joseph Williams, New Republic, October 24, 2019 Betty Riddle was 17 when she was first convicted of a felony, for clubbing another woman in the face during a fight. “Assault with a deadly weapon,” she told me recently. “I was adjudicated as an adult.” Riddle spent most of her life in and out of prison, mostly for drug possession and passing bad checks. A judge eventually declared her a danger to society as a repeat offender. “The last time I went in was 2000,” she said. “They habitualized...

By Ashly McGlone, Voice of San Diego, November 4, 2019 “Just so you know, no one else has ever made a complaint,” a Chula Vista High graduate recalls being told by school officials before she complained her show choir teacher was sexually harassing her and groped her repeatedly. “I feel like every adult who was an administrator in my life at the time failed me,” a former Bonita Vista High student sexually abused by his band teacher said. “I had a counselor talk to me for 10 minutes and then...

By Linda Carroll, Reuters, October 22, 2019 Women are often mistreated during labor and delivery at hospitals in low-income countries, a new study suggests. During in-person observations of births at urban hospitals in Ghana, Guinea and Nigeria, researchers found that more than 40 percent of women experienced physical or verbal abuse, stigmatization or discrimination related to race or ethnicity, according to a report in The Lancet. Surveys of women who had recently given birth in those...

By Andrew Ujifusa, Education Week, November 6, 2019 A study of 26 states and their preschool programs finds that as of roughly two years ago, a mere 1 percent of Latino children and just 4 percent of black children in those states were enrolled in "high-quality" state-backed early-learning opportunities. That's one main conclusion from a new report from the Education Trust, an education civil rights advocacy group. "Young Learners, Missed Opportunities: Ensuring That Black and Latino...

By Jackie Botts and Felicia Mello, Cal Matters, November 6, 2019 A college student in Fresno who struggles with hunger has applied for food stamps three times. Another student, who is homeless in Sacramento, has applied twice. Each time, they were denied. A 61-year-old in-home caretaker in Oakland was cut off from food stamps last year when her paperwork got lost. Out of work, she can’t afford groceries. While picking up a monthly box of free food, a 62-year-old senior in San Diego told...

By K. Hecht, A. Hosack, & P. Berman I had to do it. My family had to come first. Martin had turned Larry into the gang without hesitation; he had too, he was likely being watched, everyone watched everyone else in the gang. Standing at the window, seeing all the tubes coming out of Larry, watching him in silence; Martin had literally begun shaking. It had been three days without Martin seeing Larry make a single move, no matter how small. Larry remained unconscious and unnaturally still.

By P. Berman & K. Hecht, & A. Hosack It’s my fault he was driving. I was afraid to. Have I killed him? Ted is caught in the passenger seat of the bus. He can’t get out, but he doesn’t care. He can’t take his eyes off of Larry; his body is who is crumpled against a broken steering wheel – covered in blood. Ted hears noises outside of the car but can’t identify them. He needs to help Larry. What should he do? He gently reaches over and shakes Larry’s shoulder, “Larry can you hear me?”...

By P. Berman & K. Hecht, & A. Hosack Drive the bus? Is that all? Larry walked slowly out of the Abbot’s room, in a daze about what was really going on. Surely, the Abbot would want more from him than just to drive the bus to be fixed. Was this for real? Did he understand what was going on? Larry felt safe at the monastery, but he often found himself in a state of confusion; He didn’t understand how things worked in a religious community. Nothing seemed to work as he expected it to.

I just finished reading Great Expectations for the second time. I could relate to it much easier this reading as I used an ACEs lens to understand Pip's experiences and challenges. Dickens knew in 1860 the effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences. It seems strange to see humanity hasn't really evolved emotionally and socially that much in 160 years. Hopefully the ACEs movement will help propel our consciousness raising.

By Tara Duggan, San Francisco Chronicle, November 4, 2019 Most people think of people lining up at food pantries and soup kitchens as an urban phenomenon. But in Alameda County, which has one of the highest rates of food insecurity in the Bay Area, an increasing number of people living in the suburbs are also having trouble affording food. That includes Livermore, a city in the Tri-Valley area that’s better known for its wineries. “When people think of homelessness and poverty, they don’t...

By Tom Kisken, Cheri Carlson, Gretchen Wenner, and Kathleen Wilson, Ventura County Star, November 4, 2019 They want their loved ones remembered. A year after 12 people died in the shooting at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks, family members of victims say it’s not enough for people to focus only on the number of bodies. It’s just as unfair, they say, to equate their sons, daughters and spouses only with the explosion of violence at 11:20 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2018. They...