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Most classrooms in California’s transitional kindergarten program are stand-alone classes that may better prepare children for kindergarten than classes that combine transitional kindergarten and kindergarten students, according to a report released Wednesday. Transitional kindergarten is a separate program for 4-year-olds who turn 5 between Sept. 2 and Dec. 2 and miss the cut-off date for kindergarten. However, some schools combine those 4-year-olds in classes with kindergarten students,...

School is out for the summer, and while that means fun and vacation for some families, for others it can mean losing access to important sources of nutrition. Programs like the Summer Food Service Program and the Seamless Summer Option operate during the summer to address the gap in free and reduced-price meals that some children face, but they typically serve fewer children than the National School Lunch Program does during the traditional academic year. Generally speaking, food insecurity...

Abstract Studies have found traumatic experiences in childhood to have lasting effects across the lifecourse. These adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) include a variety of types of trauma, including psychological, physical or sexual abuse; living in poverty; violence in the home; living with a substance abuser; living with a mentally ill or suicidal person; or living with someone who is or has been imprisoned. Long-term effects among adults have been found in previous studies; but there is...

A few nights ago I was watching the evening news. As a self-confessed news junkie, it’s hard for me to forego my daily dose of what’s going on in the world. But that particular night I found myself struggling, and then disengaging completely. Literally switching off. The newscast consisted of nothing but journalists standing in front of assorted court houses to report on the latest atrocities: mostly people assaulting or even killing their “loved ones”. And there’s only so much of that news...

One day in February 2009, a 13-year-old boy named Sasha Egger started thinking that people were coming to hurt his family. His mother, Helen, watched with mounting panic that evening as her previously healthy son forgot the rules to Uno, his favorite card game, while playing it. She began making frantic phone calls the next morning. By then, Sasha was shuffling aimlessly around the yard, shredding paper and stuffing it in his pockets. “He looked like an old person with dementia,” Helen later...

PSI 2016 Annual Meeting - Connecting the importance of the ACEs study, trauma informed and responsive approaches in the fight to address maternal mental health.

Yoga classes will continue in the Encinitas school district for at least the next year, but the conflict over the program is likely to stretch on as the district searches for a permanent way to fund it. At a packed meeting Tuesday, the Encinitas Union School District board approved $416,000 for a health and wellness program centered on yoga practice, as part of its 2016-17 budget. That amount was scaled back from the $800,000 that Superintendent Tim Baird initially wanted to spend on...

Everything in American education is broken. Or so say the policy elites, from the online learning pioneer Sal Khan to the journalist-turned-reformer Campbell Brown . As leaders of the XQ project succinctly put it, we need to “scrap the blueprint and revolutionize this dangerously broken system.” This, they explain, is the sad truth. The educational system simply stopped working. It aged, declined, and broke. And now the nation has a mess on its hands. But there’s good news, too. As Michelle...

A nother middle-aged former NFL player committed suicide on Wednesday. His name was Lawrence Phillips, and he was found unresponsive in his cell at Kern Valley State Prison in California. He was taken to a local hospital and died soon after. It was a long way from college-football stardom and NFL dreams, and could have perhaps been prevented if only someone had taken a moment to give a damn, not only before but after his incarceration. Lawrence Phillips started his life as a target of...

Reminder: You are not a robot. Everyone gets exhausted from working too much — and you are no exception. That’s where a mental health day can come to the rescue. Research shows that Americans rarely take time off from work , yet there are so many benefits to taking some space from the confines of your cubicle. “You can easily get stressed in the workplace, which makes you so exasperated that you can’t stand going into the office,” Robert London, a New-York based psychiatrist, told The...

At some point, every pop-neuroscience story mentions a study where [insert some part of the brain] “lights up” whenever [insert some action or thought process] happens. The concept has given us empirical evidence that we should listen to more music, have more sex, eat more chocolate, and most other things we’d like to be told to do. These functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies make great stories. If you give a TED talk, I believe they’re legally required. Still no place is...

America’s safety-net programs are meant to help the poorest and most vulnerable access meet their basic needs—food, medical care, and safe housing—and there’s an ongoing debate about just how robust and successful these programs are. In his new book, The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America’s Most Vulnerable Citizens , Daniel L. Hatcher, suggests that the problems plaguing programs such as foster care and Medicaid are deeper and more troubling than most realize. Hatcher, a professor...