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This story is based on my dear friend Opal Fleming born in 1931. I promised her before she died that I would get her story published. She wanted children to know about the schools for the Deaf and how American Sign Language became a well-known language today by being passed on by other Deaf people. Opal was taken to the Oklahoma School for the Deaf by her father after he had learned about the school from a young Deaf man he had met on a train. The young man explained how he learned to read...

Studies have documented the connection between childhood trauma, and chronic disease and mental illness later in life. Some public schools in Maine are paying more attention to the impacts these experiences can have on student success. These schools are helping students identify — and cope with — the stressors that are effecting their lives. Waterville High School teacher Sherry Brown sees her students differently than she did several years ago. That's when she first learned about "adverse...

Students in Claire Foote's music class at Jesse S. Bobo Elementary School smiled brightly as they worked together using tissue boxes to choreograph a song about sneezing. Down the hall, teacher Jessica Barwick led groups of fifth-grade students in a classroom Lego building project. At Jesse S. Bobo Elementary, teachers and students are encouraged to model positive behaviors as a way to reinforce kindness and respect toward others. “We're being proactive and we're talking to students about...

By now, many of us in the ACEs movement have seen, or at least heard of, the documentary film, Paper Tigers . The film captures the lives of students, teachers, and administrators at Lincoln High School, and ultimately the entire community of Walla Walla, WA. I saw the movie for the second time this week, and was reminded of the spirit of collaboration and unconditional love that is ever present throughout the film. The entire school community -- administrators, teachers, health...

Are we teaching our kids to feel? It’s a question posed by countless education pioneers, many of whom took issue with the rigid conformity of No Child Left Behind (and found at least some subsequent relief through the new Every Student Succeeds Act). And as study after study proves, Americans don’t fare too well in social-emotional competency; the need for early childhood education is becoming increasingly more apparent. For more, Pacific Standard spoke with Joan Cole Duffell, executive...

In most public schools, when students misbehave badly enough, they're suspended from class and sent out of school. Ted Fuller says that was the tactic he used during his nine years serving as the dean of students at Hellgate High School. "And in all those years I never saw it really work," he says, "especially with kids who really struggle all the time with behaving appropriately." Fuller was appointed principal of Sentinel High School at the end of 2014. At the beginning of the 2015-16...

This is an excellent introduction to ACEs and the trauma-informed movement. https://vimeo.com/139998006

In New York’s Hudson Valley, farm-to-table food is no longer limited to upscale restaurants like Blue Hill Stone Barns. Because of mom Sandy McKelvey, fresh food grown on local farms is now bettering the fare in school cafeterias. The Farm-to-School movement took off in this rural, scenic region north of New York City in 2009, shortly after McKelvey and her family moved to Cold Spring Harbor. At her daughter’s new elementary school, she volunteered to introduce a new curriculum centered on a...

For thousands of Detroit families, the daily trek begins in darkness, before dawn. Myesha Williams, a mother of eight on Detroit’s west side, sets out at 7 a.m. to deliver her three school-aged sons to three different schools on opposite ends of the city—and she considers herself lucky. She has a car and a large family that can help share the driving. Total daily journey: up to 93.5 miles, 3 hours. Monique Johnson starts her trek even earlier, just after 6 a.m. when she and her son Shownn, a...

When students and teachers learn together about how their brains influence behavior, one expert says, discipline can become less of a confrontation and more of a partnership. The field of educational neuroscience is at the intersection of cognitive psychology, education and neuroscience, and some of its teachings suggest findings from brain research can be applied to classroom management and discipline techniques. Some trend toward the area of “mindfulness,” such as attempting to sharpen...

Santa Ana Unified School District officials -- who as recently as five years ago were heavily criticized for being too quick to kick kids out of school for behavior problems -- are now being credited for a steep decline in out-of-school suspensions. While school suspensions and expulsions declined statewide by more than 33 percent between the 2011-12 and 2014-15 school years, in Santa Ana suspensions dropped by 58 percent during the same time period, The decline is due not only to a...

A less-traveled path to education reform: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is catalyzing three social forces to create an epidemic of best practice . Ashoka founder and CEO Bill Drayton recently wrote about his vision for a “changemaker world”—a place where problems can’t outrun solutions. He told a story about Ali Raza Khan, an entrepreneur in Pakistan, who tasked 6,000 poor students with starting successful ventures. He explains how, with little more than hearty encouragement, the...