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There won’t be any more cheese sandwiches served at Elk Grove Unified schools. The region’s largest school district will no longer give students a bland, alternative lunch when they run out of meal funds or forget their lunch money. Elk Grove Unified is joining districts across the region and nation that are changing rules so that children who come up short for lunch money aren’t embarrassed with a different meal than what their peers receive – or not fed at all, as has been the case...

In the years after the Great Recession, Stockton, California, became the poster child of financial ruin. The mid-sized city was crushed by the housing collapse , and made national headlines for the resulting high foreclosure rates , drastic municipal cuts, record violent crime , and finally, bankruptcy . For these reasons and others, it has featured at the very top of Forbes’ annual list of “America’s Most Miserable Cities” more than once. [For more of this story, written by Tanvi Misra, go...

Grab a coffee, sit back and enjoy the read! I think its an interesting one. The beginning will become more clear as you near the end. I'm writing this because I have NEVER understood how a oerson could feel such disdain for someone that they dont even know personally. I started WomenNotAlone during a time when I was going through some major life changes and felt alone and unsupported in life. Iam wondering if that "alone" feeling I once felt could very well be at the core of all the hatred...

Mindfulness can improve health in other ways as well. One mindfulness-based program even helps treat eating disorders. People who binge on food are overly sensitive to outside cues, says Jean Kristeller. She is a psychologist at Indiana State University in Terre Haute. Kristeller created a program to help combat binge eating. Called Mindfulness-Based Eating Awareness Training, or MB-EAT, it helps people reconnect with their bodies. The goal is to make diners more aware so that they can...

And heroin led to the most deaths among 15- to 19-year-olds, CDC says The rate of opioid drug overdose deaths among older teenagers in the United States has taken a turn for the worse, a new federal report finds. The number of drug overdose deaths among 15- to 19-year-olds rose 15 percent for males from 2014 to 2015 and 35 percent for females from 2013 to 2015, according to the report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Heroin was the most common cause of fatal opioid...

Despite rhetoric at the federal level, Illinois’ struggles are a reality that will not end in the foreseeable future. Because Illinois had been without a state budget for more than two years, vital organizations that serve our children, families, and communities have either scaled services back dramatically or have disappeared. Yet the basic needs for attention to health for children with special needs, their families, and the communities in which they live are still very visible. From the...

Every day seems to bring a new tragic story of a person with serious mental illness killed by police. In Seattle, for example, there were recently back-to-back deaths: a 30-year-old pregnant woman shot in front of her children, and a 20-year-old man killed right before his high-school graduation during what appeared to be his first psychotic episode, with a pen in his hand police mistook for a knife. Sometimes, the consequences are not death but violent confrontations, arrests, and...

White supremacist racism is shaking Charlottesville and the country. It is difficult to make sense out of such nonsense. Protesters chanted “take America back,” “you will not replace us,” and “blood and soil,” a well-known Nazi rallying cry. But they came to fight, not speak, fueled by anger and projecting their own deep anxieties onto the feared “other.” This type of hatred is not new in America. Behind the racist slogans are historical tropes that the broader White America clings to, not...

When a white person kills a black man in America, the killer often faces no legal consequences. In one in six of these killings, there is no criminal sanction, according to a new Marshall Project examination of 400,000 homicides committed by civilians between 1980 and 2014. That rate is far higher than the one for homicides involving other combinations of races. [For more of this story, written by Daniel Lathrop & Anna Flagg, go to ...

wo years ago, I published a report showing that schools in San Francisco were becoming increasingly segregated by race. In the public debate that followed, no one disputed the facts. However, I was struck by the apathetic, and even hostile, responses from many readers.

A new PBS Documentary on POV titled Tribal Justice that spotlights tribal courts that incorporate indigenous customs and beliefs into their justice systems and the families that are affected. The documentary, directed by Anne Makepeace, follows Abby Abinanti and Claudette White, chief judges in two of the more than 300 tribal courts across the country, as they navigate cross-jurisdictional issues in their courts and communities. Tribal Justice has its national broadcast premiere on the PBS...

For many teachers, a pall has been cast over the first few days of school. This weekend, a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., turned deadly when a 20-year-old man drove his car into counter-protesters, fatally injuring one woman and hurting 19 others. The Associated Press reported that the high school teacher of the man accused of the incident said he had been fascinated with Nazism in school, and had "deeply held, radical" convictions on race in the 9th grade. Even before the...