Blog

It’s that time of the year when students, parents and school staff prepare to return to the classroom. Students look for new outfits to wear on the first day of school while parents check off a supply list. Recently at Cleveland County Schools, teacher assistants had an opportunity to prepare for students by learning more about the impact of trauma on the brain. Jasmine Cain, Benchmarks’ PFE Project Manager, explained the different types of trauma and how behaviors exhibited by students are...

By Erica Pandey, Axios, August 18, 2019 "White privilege" has become a common phrase in Americans' conversations about race — and that's unsettling many white Americans because they think it undervalues their struggles or questions the legitimacy of their successes. Why it matters: The term is a new weapon — and fault line — in American culture and politics. It’s one of a growing list of phrases different sides view very differently. The big picture: The dynamics of "white privilege" were...

By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times, August 16, 2019 About 1 in 1,000 black men and boys in America can expect to die at the hands of police, according to a new analysis of deaths involving law enforcement officers. That makes them 2.5 times more likely than white men and boys to die during an encounter with cops. The analysis also showed that Latino men and boys, black women and girls and Native American men, women and children are also killed by police at higher rates than their white peers.

By Garance Burke, Juliet Linderman, and Martha Mendoza, Associated Press News, August 16, 2019 This story is part of an ongoing joint investigation between The Associated Press and the PBS series FRONTLINE on the treatment of migrant children, which includes an upcoming film. After local Guatemalan officials burned down an environmental activist’s home, he decided to leave his village behind and flee to the United States, hoping he’d be granted asylum and his little boy, whose heart was...

Okay, so I know Mister Rogers may strike many of us as quaint, yesterday, trite, or maybe even scary (eek! those sweaters!), but I recently read his book and found many little nuggets that I thought many of you might find inspiring or fun as well and a lot of them are key to healing from adverse childhood experiences. Here ya go: 1. A life of spiritual wholeness is represented by looking inward with our hearts (inner disciplines affect how we see others), looking outward with our eyes (how...

"How are you feeling today?" "What's your goal for today?" "Who can you ask for help if you need it?" This may sound like an unusual start to your next staff meeting, but these questions, and the purpose for asking them, is deeply rooted in trauma theory and what we know about the importance of connections when healing from trauma. I've been a distant fan of the Sanctuary Model for several years now, learning about it through my work with ACEs Connection as well as my work with systems eager...

By Arielle Dreher, The Spokesman-Review, July 19, 2019 Spokane County Sheriff’s Deputy Dan Moman and Frontier Behavioral Health mental health clinician Holly Keller were riding around on their shift this summer when they got an urgent call. The family of a man who had run into traffic before had called 911 to report he was running away from home, and deputies who had already responded to the situation said he was not following commands. Moman and Keller rushed to the scene. When they...

By Danielle Fox, Center for Health Journalism, August 8, 2019 Engaged journalism is the key to sustainability and gaining trust in our communities — it’s not feel-good journalism, it’s necessary journalism, Ashley Alvarado, director of community engagement at Southern California Public Radio (KPCC), recently told a room full of reporters at the 2019 National Fellowship. Alvarado and ProPublica engagement editor and reporter Ariana Tobin relayed lessons from the field about how engagement...

By Larry Gordon, EdSource, August 15, 2019 In David Kirp’s new book “The College Dropout Scandal” (Oxford University Press), the UC Berkeley emeritus professor of public policy calls low college graduation rates “higher education’s dirty little secret.” Nationwide, only about 3 out of 5 incoming freshmen graduate within six years. The rate is dramatically worse at some schools in California. He says those statistics result from “a dereliction of duty that has gotten too little public...

By Linda Villarosa, The New York Times, August 14, 2019 The excruciatingly painful medical experiments went on until his body was disfigured by a network of scars. John Brown, an enslaved man on a Baldwin County, Ga., plantation in the 1820s and ’30s, was lent to a physician, Dr. Thomas Hamilton, who was obsessed with proving that physiological differences between black and white people existed. Hamilton used Brown to try to determine how deep black skin went, believing it was thicker than...

The elementary school principal routinely broke into tears. At Wednesday afternoon meetings of the Creating Trauma Sensitive Arizona Schools work group, a committee of the Arizona ACE Consortium , the leader of a high-need, inner-city K-5 school frequently wept as she talked about the trauma her students carried into the classroom and the ways it percolated throughout her campus: in lagging test scores, behavior problems, even teacher retention. The other committee members became her...

By Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, August 15, 2019 Systems for Action (S4A) is a signature research program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) that helps to build the evidence base for a Culture of Health by rigorously testing new ways of connecting the nation’s fragmented medical, social, and public health systems. Studies conducted through the S4A program test innovative mechanisms for aligning delivery and financing systems for medical, social, and public health services, with a...