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Philly’s youngest students will no longer be suspended from school for misbehavior. The School Reform Commission announced today that it has approved revisions to the Student Code of Conduct that will remove suspensions as punishment for Kindergarten students. “We remain focused on academic achievement, children reading on grade level, and college and career readiness. The early years are the most important, and we need students in school,” said Superintendent William Hite in a statement .

Chicago is a city with a rich black heritage. And the South Side, fondly dubbed the “heart of black America,” is where much of the city’s cherished history emanates. Comprising a mix of poverty-stricken, working-class, and upper-income black residents, the South Side can lay claim to the country’s first black woman senator , the nation’s first black president , and various black elites . Chicago also holds the inglorious distinction of being one of the country’s most segregated cities. This...

A few blocks away from Bernita Bradley’s house, the Detroit Public School district ends and the Grosse Pointe Public School System begins. The border is invisible, but with a 12-year-old daughter enrolled in DPS, the reminders for Bradley are impossible to ignore . There are the MacBooks in every Grosse Pointe student’s hand. There’s the annual Grosse Pointe toy drive, which distributes free bicycles to every child who needs one. And there are the parks with shiny new playground equipment,...

By Brittany Grego, WTOV 9 Fox, West Virginia August 22, 2016 OHIO COUNTY, W.Va. — School is back in session for Ohio County students and a program is expanding to more elementary schools. Crittenton Services is bringing the TIES program to five more elementary schools this year, including Elm Grove. TIES stands for trauma informed elementary schools. The TIES program is designed to help students in grades pre-K through first grade who show symptoms of chronic stress or trauma in the...

by Katherine Cabaniss, Cypress Creek Mirror August 23, 2016 Students have returned to school. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are on their minds. Teachers, parents, administrators, and all who care about kids are focused first on academic achievement. In the Greater Houston area, one program focuses on students’ minds in a different way. Mental Health America of the Greater Houston Area (“MHA”) concentrates on kids’ mental health. MHA’s goals further not only student success, but also...

Imagine the countless hours spent in high school classrooms: blackboards, textbooks, lesson plans. Now imagine if you could spend half of that typical day in real-world offices, solving real-world problems. That’s exactly what the students in the Iowa BIG program get to do every school year. Iowa BIG began as a collaborative effort between area business leaders and the Cedar Rapids Gazette Companies to begin to reimagine the typical approach to education. Its pilot kicked off in 2013, with...

The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement has placed attention on longstanding institutional racism and the racial bias that exists throughout society. But it's also led to resistance, as well as rising tensions between police and people of color. Education Secretary John King said a big part of this problem could be tackled if schools teach empathy. "As an educator, part of our role is to help students to see the world through others' eyes," King said. One way to do that, he said, is to...

Whether it's a parent or the student who have served time, schools see challenges. Beyond helping children of incarcerated parents pay for college, a growing body of research supports helping these children throughout the K-12 system, limiting harsh discipline policies that disproportionately impact them, training teachers to recognize the underlying causes of certain behaviors and targeting the intergenerational nature of the school-to-prison pipeline. When Jason Nance started travelling...

"Just notice your breath, the sensation of your air coming in, going out," says Christa Turksma, a Dutch woman dressed all in white with silver-white hair. She's one of the co-founders of Cultivating Awareness and Resilience for Educators , or CARE for Teachers. For the past nine years at this annual five-day summer retreat, and now within schools, CARE for Teachers teaches what's called mindfulness: calming the body and mind through breathing and movement, and using insights from psychology...

by Bailey Kirkpatrick, What is Epigenetics August 16, 2016 It’s possible that the impact of traumatic experiences may be epigenetically inherited via molecular memory that is passed down through generations. Although still controversial, new research takes this concept a step further and demonstrates that traumatic behavior could be reversed when it would otherwise be inherited. A study, published in Neuropsychopharmacology , was conducted by researchers at the University of Zurich and ETH...

Toxic stress occurs in children when they experience prolonged episodes of physical or emotional abuse, neglect, caregiver substance abuse or mental illness or economic hardship without adult support. This affects children in ways far more detrimental than typical stress. It makes children more likely to develop problems such as heart disease, stroke, asthma, obesity and diabetes later in life. Several organizations received a $1.1 million Bethesda Inc. grant to team up with pediatric...

Remember middle school? Remember how everything could be mortifying, especially if you didn't have the right brand of jeans or that certain kind of backpack or the expensive boat shoes everyone else (yes, everyone, Mom!) has? Now imagine middle school if you not only couldn't afford those brands, but you couldn't even find a way to clean the clothes you do have. The prospect might just be mortifying enough to make you skip class altogether. Now, two school districts have found that the...