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Lance leans over his desk, his round belly situating his body tightly between the wooden chair and plastic desk—both too small for someone with his girth. A collection of yellow notepad papers, their edges frayed after being torn from their original binding, wrestle alongside one another in his hands. It is a Saturday morning, and the classroom is small, and silent but for the friction of Lance’s papers and the grinding on the pen he bites out of nervous habit. His large fingers fiddle about...

I t would have been a mistake to follow through with an initial plan to abruptly close North Highland Elementary School without taking time to consult with the community or to make plans. To her credit, Superintendent Aurora Lora has backed off from that approach . [For more of this story, written by John Thompson, go to https://nondoc.com/2017/06/27/north-highland-elementary-history/]

On Sunday , police officers in Seattle shot and killed Charleena Lyles in her home. She died in front of “several children,” according to reports, and her family members say she was pregnant. Just days before, Jeronimo Yanez, the Minnesota police officer who shot and killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop, was acquitted of all charges. Earlier this spring, an unarmed teenager named Jordan Edwards was shot and killed by police as he was driving away from a party. By now, it’s become a...

Human jobs in the future will be the ones that require emotional labour: currently undervalued and underpaid but invaluable Early last year, the World Economic Forum issued a paper warning that technological change is on the verge of upending the global economy. To fill the sophisticated jobs of tomorrow, the authors argued, the ‘reskilling and upskilling of today’s workers will be critical’. Around the same time, the then president Barack Obama announced a ‘computer science for all’...

Wilhelmina Delco learned to swim at 80. Harold Berman is in his 67th year practicing law. Mildred Walston spent 76 years on the job at a candy company. And brothers Joe and Warren Barger are finding new spots in their respective homes for the gold medals they’ve just earned in track-and-field events at the National Senior Games. These octogenarians and nonagenarians may not be widely known outside their local communities, but just as their more famous peers — think Carl Reiner, Betty White,...

Monique Taylor started developing mental health issues as a child following a traumatic sexual assault, but because she wasn't able to deal with the trauma as a child, she turned to methamphetamine as an adult. As a child, Taylor spent years being sexually assaulted by her stepfather and even after he was arrested, she had to relive the trauma through testimony at his trial and probation hearing. Years later, not only was she dealing with a mentally and physically abusive husband, but she...

The shooting death of Charleena Lyles, a 30-year-old pregnant mother of four, by Seattle police has brought anger and criticism yet again of the way police engage African Americans . The Seattle Police Department’s history of using excessive force and employing discriminatory practices against Black Seattleites prompted the 2011 U.S. Justice Department investigation into the SPD’s conduct, resulting in court-ordered reforms . In 2015, the SPD began training officers in crisis intervention...

Over the past twenty years several studies have shown that ACEs are common and that there is a strong relationship of these experiences with various health factors. Although these studies have all been very important in helping to establish the frequency of adverse childhood experiences, very little has actually been asked of children themselves. In addition, never before has a direct link been made with what a large, representative group of children (N = 664) say they have experienced in...

From Trauma to Resilience: Fostering Hope Through Trauma-Informed Care As we know, early life experiences are the foundational building blocks for development, learning, and health throughout a person’s lifetime. Trauma can have a long-term effect on well-being and functioning for children, adults, families, and our community. Gundersen National Child Protection Training Center (Gundersen NCPTC) has developed a new training on adverse childhood experiences (ACE) and trauma-informed care...

Until Carmencita Robinson received a letter last July stating that her public housing complex would need to be evacuated due to toxic levels of lead and arsenic in the soil, she’d had no idea she’d been living on contaminated land for nearly a decade. “I felt betrayed,” she said. “They knew that there was lead, and they misled the families that were there because they continuously accepted our rent and gave us no notice of lead.” A month later came the second blow. When Mayor Anthony...

Seattle’s decision to hike its minimum wage up to $13 an hour—on its way to $15—ended up costing its low-wage workers time on the job, hundreds of dollars of annual income, and a shot at a better livelihood. That is a reasonable conclusion one could draw from a blockbuster, if not yet peer-reviewed, new study on the city’s famed minimum-wage increases. The research, performed by a group of academics from the University of Washington, looks at detailed data on the earnings and hours of...

Today, along with the heads of several tech companies, I will be attending a meeting at the White House convened under the auspices of the American Technology Council (ATeC). I wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post explaining why, but I wanted to share a bit more about the decision with the Code for America community here. This is not a decision I have made lightly. I personally believe that, outside of the issues discussed at this meeting, the policies of the Trump administration are...