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What a great thread of responses I received from around the country about a National Mandate for ACE Testing parents who show up for pre and post natal appointments. Yet, somehow we need to take this subject to another level eh? For all of us who understand the significance of ACEs...most of us are ready to climb to the highest point and start SCREAMING about the subject. It clearly affects how you look at the world differently. ACEs impact schools, churches, corporations, associations,...

The number of children and young people seeking help from mental health services has spiked in the wake of recent terrorist attacks in England, according to the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP). Hospitals across the Manchester region have seen an estimated 10% increase in children seeking help since a bomb ripped through the Manchester Arena on 22 May , killing 22 people, according to the RCP. Mental health experts in Greater Manchester hospitals received hundreds more patients from June...

If there is anything to be learned from recent political events, it is that the public does not want to see corporations grow rich off of the suffering of families. Yet, it’s something we see daily in Texas. It is time to end the imprisonment of mothers and children who seek asylum protection in the U.S. after fleeing violence in Central America and other troubled countries. Family detention allows for-profit prison corporations to treat children as commodities whose imprisonment provides a...

Take the Golden Rule to School Rap You don’t have to be like me to be OK, I don’t have to be like you for us to play. Respect my person, I’ll respect yours. If we can appreciate our differences, we may learn something new. Treat me like you want to be treated, Ill do the same for you. (Ramblings in Rhyme by Dr. Ivy)

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you be kind to one another… The second leading cause of death in children 10-18 is suicide. What went wrong? What did someone miss? What could’ve been different? In this situation, a young person was led to hang themselves and attributed it to bullying. They were 15. They had found no value in living because it appeared to them that life had found no value in them. In the last line of the obituary, it read in lieu of flowers, the family ask you be...

Deborah Rumsey, executive director at Children’s Health Alliance, joins us in this edition of What They’re Watching to discuss building resiliency in families. [For more go to http://stateofreform.com/commentary/what-theyre-watching/2017/07/theyre-watching-deborah-rumsey/]

The Ark Project is making sure homeless youth are being taken care of in Coos County. The project received six grants this month, helping it prepare for the upcoming school year. Coos Bay School District's special programs director, Lisa DeSalvio, said that the majority of the county is made up of working poor. Right now, the Coos Bay School District is seeing 75 percent of its students in poverty. “It's outrageous,” she said. “When you look at the poverty rate and you've got a lot of single...

Adapted from remarks to the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference, San Francisco, July 17, 2017. Since November, a kind of fatalistic cloud has settled over the campaign to reform the federal criminal justice system. With a law-and-order president, a tough-on-crime attorney general, and a Congress that has become even more polarized than it was in former President Barack Obama’s time, most reform advocates say any serious fixes to the federal system are unlikely. Reformers have been consoling...

Measuring the human cost of the tough-on-crime policies of the 1980s and 90s has never been a simple task. Researchers have tried to show the impact by measuring how long prisoners spent behind bars before they were released. They found that time served has increased over the past decades. But that approach skips a whole group: People whose incarceration has been going on so long they have yet to get out. Now, a new study by the Urban Institute is trying something different. The nonprofit...

In 2013, Kentucky, Rhode Island, and Nevada had some of the highest rates of death from opioid overdoses, and they also had some of the country’s highest unemployment rates . A series of studies suggests that this joblessness might have been—at least in part—contributing to the high rates of drug addiction. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper I wrote about a few months ago found that as the unemployment rate increases by 1 percentage point in a given county, the opioid-death rate...

Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and … diabetes . That’s right. The metabolic condition is about as American as you can get, according to a new national report card on diabetes released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . The report shows that nearly half of Americans have diabetes or prediabetes, which puts them at high risk for the condition. A good number of these folks haven’t been diagnosed and don’t even realize their predicament. [For more of this story, written...

Roxane Gay is fat. Her new book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, tells the brutally raw story of how she got so fat and why. At 12 she was gang raped. She barely had words for what happened to her, and the words she could muster she couldn’t say to anyone, not even her parents. They loved her but she was a good Catholic girl, and good girls didn’t get raped. So she swallowed her secret and got big, big enough that she felt safe from male attention. Which is the response many girls have to...