Blog

I am not much different from my students. I hate Saturday School when I have to get out of bed to be back in the building that exhausted me the week before, but I love it after I get there and have meaningful interactions with students in a more casual environment. Like this one: "Hey Ida B. Wells!" I greet a student. "I like it when you call me that!" she replies. "Do you remember why I started calling you that?" "Yea. Cuz you said I was outspoken and had a lot of strong opinions about...

By Amanda Winn, 4/21/22, https://positiveexperience.org/category/blog/ Over the summer, the HOPE National Resource Center started a Train the Facilitator program. The goal was to train staff from organizations to present the basics of HOPE to both members of their organizations and to their community partners. Members who go through all three sessions of the program become certified HOPE facilitators. By January, there was enough interest in the program for the HOPE National Resource Center...

By Andrew Joseph, Photo: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images, STAT, April 12, 2022 A fter staying flat for a decade, the overdose death rate among U.S. adolescents nearly doubled from 2019 to 2020 — an alarming climb that continued into 2021, a study released Tuesday showed. The reasons do not include a surge of children in this group — ages 14 to 18 — using drugs, researchers said. If anything, survey data indicate that fewer teens experimented with drugs during the pandemic. Rather, a main factor...

By Simon Appolloni, Image: Pixabay, Phys Org, April 19, 2022 As they become more exposed to the grim realities of climate change, today's teens and people in their 20s— an entire generation —are experiencing increased anxiety, grief, fear or guilt about the planet's future as well as their own. For teachers of environmental studies, softening the scientific evidence about what lies ahead —in terms of sea-level rise and the increased intensity, duration and frequency of storms, droughts and...

By Kyle Swenson, Photo: Nathan Morgan/The Washington Post, The Washington Post, April 18, 2022 It was Friday, and for more than a decade, Fridays had been when the food deliveries arrived. Around 15,000 pounds of food were expected this morning. Volunteers were hauling the first boxes off a truck. Stacy Downey, 52, was determined, if possible, to treat this day like any other, so she was now standing outside the Little Food Pantry That Could, shoulders hunched against the morning cold,...

By Ezra Klein, Photo: Melina Mara/The Washington Post/Getty Images, The New York Times, April 17, 2022 “We said we wouldn’t accept the levels of child poverty we have as a permanent feature of our democracy,” Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, told me. “And not only did the world not come to an end, but the families I talked to, who spent the money on everything from school clothes to a bicycle, were relieved of stress. That was the word they used with me. They were relieved of...

April is National Child Abuse Prevention month. For the entire month of April, co-hosts Ingrid Cockhren, CEO of PACEs Connection, and Mathew Portell, director of communities, will examine America's history of child abuse and neglect and outline how this history connects to our current child abuse crisis. In part three of this series of episodes dedicated to the systemic nature of child abuse and neglect in America, Cockhren and Portell will discuss the different layers of influence embedded...

By Usha Lee McFarling, Photo: Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, STAT, April 11, 2022 A year after the prestigious medical journal JAMA was embroiled in controversy over a podcast seen as racist by critics, the American Medical Association has appointed a prominent health-equity researcher as the publication’s new editor-in-chief — the first person of color to hold the position. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, a Black internist, epidemiologist, and health-equity researcher from the University of California,...

By isabellazavarise, Photo: Randy Vazquez/BuzzFeed News, BuzzFeed News, April 16, 2022 Theo Henderson was in a hurry. He was walking through Little Tokyo in Los Angeles and recognized a fellow person experiencing homelessness whom he knew, but in his haste, he didn’t say hi. The next day, Henderson watched the man’s body be zipped into a bag. But it wasn’t the death that most disturbed Henderson; it was the reaction from people who continued to go about their day, ignoring what was happening...

By Olga Khazan, Photo: Oskar Poss/ullstein bild/Getty, The Atlantic, April 14, 2022 If you ask some ( okay, many ) conservative pundits , Democrats are “ grooming ” children . As in, grooming them to be abused by pedophiles. Some Republicans have even accused Democrats of being pedophiles themselves . The grooming charges lump together concerns that kids are being introduced too early to sexually explicit material, to the existence of transgender people, and to non-heterosexual sexual...

By Katrina vaden Heuvel, Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post, February 19, 2022 American media’s approach to war coverage needs to be fundamentally reimagined. We need more reporting on forgotten conflicts — and more stories that spotlight how war ravages people and leads to atrocities. Last month, the big three U.S. television networks spent as much or more time covering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as any other conflict during any month of the past three decades — including the...

By Christian Caron, Photo: Cheriss May/The New York Times, The New York Times, April 12, 2022 The worsening state of mental health among children has prompted an influential group of experts to recommend for the first time screening all children ages 8 to 18 for anxiety, one of the most common mental health disorders of childhood . A draft of the new guidelines, which is open to public comment , will most likely be finalized later this year. It was issued on Tuesday by the U.S. Preventive...