Blog

Leaders from across the Sunshine State will take part in a “Think Tank” in Naples, FL, on Monday, August 6, to help create a more trauma-informed Florida. The estimated 350 attendees will include policy makers and community teams made up of school superintendents, law enforcement officers, judges, hospital administrators, mayors, PTA presidents, child welfare experts, mental health and substance abuse treatment providers, philanthropists, university researchers, state agency heads, and...

As students enter college this fall, many will hunger for more than knowledge. Up to half of college students report that they were either not getting enough to eat or were worried about it, according to published studies . “Food insecurity,” as it’s called, is most prevalent at community colleges, but it’s common at public and private four-year schools as well. Student activists and advocates in the education community have drawn attention to the problem in recent years, and the food...

As schools respond to the 30 percent increase in demand for counseling, artist Ella Baron gives a glimpse inside some students’ experiences. Illustrator Ella Baron conducted a series of interviews with college students, many who had suspended their studies because of mental health concerns, to create a series of sketches about the mental health crisis at colleges, listening to the recordings as she drew. The images, published in June 2017 in The Guardian, are as pointed as they are...

In a report published last week , Jen Mishory , a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, sheds some light on an oft-debated topic in education circles: Do the benefits of "free college" programs outweigh the costs? There has been a proliferation of state-level "free college" programs in recent years. In 2014, Tennessee rolled out its Tennessee Promise initiative, which covers tuition and fees for all recent high school graduates at state community colleges and technical schools. Since...

Mental-health problems among college students have been climbing since the 1990s, according to the American Psychological Association. And with services increasingly stretched at campus health centers, students have been taking action themselves through peer-run mental-health clubs and organizations. The approach appears to be paying off, a new study finds. In what they describe as the largest study of its kind, researchers found that across 12 California colleges, such student-run efforts...

Behavioral risk factor surveillance system state survey on exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs): Who declines to respond? [Children and Youth Services Review] "A wealth of research has examined the prevalence and impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) via various research methodologies. Some of these studies have also examined the presence of nonresponse bias, showing minimal nonresponse bias effects. More recently, many states and the District of Columbia have used the...

A four-minute film produced for the UnLonely Film Festival and Conference last month featured a young woman who, as a college freshman, felt painfully alone . She desperately missed her familiar haunts and high school buddies who seemed, on Facebook at least, to be having the time of their lives. It reminded me of a distressing time I had as an 18-year-old college sophomore — feeling friendless, unhappy and desperate to get out of there. I didn’t know it then, but I was in the age bracket —...

All San Diego high school graduates who are first-time college students can receive free community college tuition under an expansion of the San Diego Promise Program announced Monday. “We’re announcing the ultimate expansion of our program,” said Constance Carroll, chancellor of the San Diego Community College District . “A college education is key to economic advancement.” The district estimates that as many as 3,500 students may be eligible for the program in the 2018-2019 academic year.

Years of efforts to prevent sexual harassment in science, engineering and medicine have failed, and universities need to make sweeping changes in the way they deal with the issue, a searing new report by a national advisory panel concluded on Tuesday. “There is no evidence to suggest that current policies, procedures, and approaches have resulted in a significant reduction in sexual harassment,” said the report, which was more than two years in the making , starting well before the #MeToo...

Trauma-Informed Approaches (TIA) recognize the impact of trauma on the human experience. Everyone experiences trauma differently, and our experiences create a lens through which we view, and process, stressors. Training in TIA not only enhances professionals’ abilities to recognize and accommodate people in crisis to ensure their success. If applied habitually, these principles allow us to help all students (or clients, or patients), and not just those about whose trauma we are already aware.

About 30 percent of high school students in California go on to graduate from college, but only about 8 percent of foster youth make it that far, according to research by the Public Policy Institute of California and the University of Chicago. Young people who spend their teen years in foster care are more likely to land in jail than to earn a college degree. Those bleak prospects deter some students from even considering higher-ed options. Under the umbrella of Guardian Scholars programs,...

The number of college assistance programs for current and former foster youth is growing, but there are still major gaps in helping students access them, according to a national survey of state-run colleges. The goal of the survey, produced by the First Star Institute’s Foster Youth Success in College Project, is “to provide a more detailed current look at what these programs look like, how extensive they are throughout the country, and to detail best practices in place in different parts of...