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What’s the last conversation you had with a police officer? Chances are it wasn’t about the weather. Or your favorite local cover band. Or their kid’s youth soccer game. Chance are … it was more stressful than not. All that’s about to change, if Sergeant Chis Cognac has anything to say about it. Operating under some simple guidelines (“no speeches, no agenda”), the co-founder of Coffee With a Cop has set out to shift the timbre of police-citizen interactions. “You can talk about crime or you...

[Ed. note: This is cross-posted from the ACEs in Education group, where Leisa Irwin is the community editor. If you want more information about trauma-informed schools, please join the ACEs in Education group.] I recently wrote a blog post about how to take the first step in creating a trauma informed care model (TIC) in your school. The first step, Establishing a Baseline, is necessary because it fuels future steps in the process. In the blog post "Is Your School Ready to be Trauma Informed...

Check out NPR's interactive app exploring mental health in public schools. http://apps.npr.org/mental-health/

Every Monday morning at Harvie Elementary School, in Henrico County, Va., Brett Welch stands outside her office door as kids file in. "The first thing I'm looking for are the faces," says Welch, a school counselor. She's searching for hints of fear, pain or anger. "Maybe there was a domestic incident at the house that weekend," says Welch. "That's reality for a lot of our kids." And a reality for a lot of kids in the U.S. While it's difficult to get an exact number, researchers estimate that...

Juvenile justice reform advocates can spread their message further if they carefully guide their audience to an understanding of adolescent development and the justice system, researchers say. The key is to reframe the issue of reform so that the public does not leap to conclusions about a broken system but instead thinks about how it can be improved. “If advocates can make that subtle shift, they’ll build a much bigger constituency,” said Julie Sweetland, vice president for strategy and...

More than 40 million American adults — almost 20 percent of the adult American population — will deal with mental illness this year. Yet mental health (of the citizens, not the candidates) has not been an issue in the presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton tried to change that last week, announcing a plan that offers hope for improving mental health research, diagnosis and treatment. Central to Mrs. Clinton’s plan is the integration of physical and mental health care and reducing the stigma...

Reactions to a dean’s letter against shielding students from controversial or offensive ideas To the Editor: Re “University of Chicago Rebels Against Moves to Stifle Speech” (front page, Aug. 27): To those academics who oppose content warnings in the classroom: We are not seeking to diminish your freedom of expression. We do not want to limit in any way your conversations or hinder the dialogues in which you might engage. All we ask for is the courtesy of a chance for our peers to brace...

Philadelphia — First you get your coat. I don’t care if you don’t remember where you left it, you find it. If there was a lot of blood you ask someone to go quickly to the basement to get you a new set of scrubs. You put on your coat and you go into the bathroom. You look in the mirror and you say it. You use the mother’s name and you use her child’s name. You may not adjust this part in any way. I will show you: If it were my mother you would say, “Mrs. Rosenberg. I have terrible, terrible...

"I couldn't really relate to that," Peter Robinson said of his fellow inmate. "I know what loss feels like, though." Like the other prisoner, Robinson struggles with mental illness; he has bipolar disorder and depression. The men talked for a long time. They came to focus on the message of the Serenity Prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. "The things I can't, you've just got to...

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, wrote in her annual message this year that “Building a Culture of Health in America…is much like assembling a quilt. It requires many hands working together. And often, the most unlikely pairings create the most evocative designs.” Over the next few months, the Shared Learnings series will explore the unconventional partnerships that lend power to the 14 community ACE & resilience networks participating in...

Hi, Coach! Congratulations on your recent induction into The Des Moines Sunday Register Iowa Sports Hall of Fame. The honor, of course, is well-deserved. I’ve written many times that you and your friends and longtime assistants, Jan Jensen and Jenni Fitzgerald, are some of the finest people I’ve ever met. I wanted to take a moment to tell you why. We met when I was 19 years old, a sophomore at Drake University during the 1994-95 academic year. I was the sports editor of the student...

The precocious teen who’s too cool for school—earning high marks despite skipping class—is a pop-culture standard, the idealized version of an effortless youth for whom success comes easy. Too bad it’s largely a work of fiction that belies a much harsher reality: Missing just two days a month of school for any reason exposes kids to a cascade of academic setbacks, from lower reading and math scores in the third grade to higher risks of dropping out of high school, research suggests. A new...