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$271,318 . That’s how much California expects to spend per youth this year on its failed state youth correctional facilities, the Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ). This amount of money could drastically improve a young person’s education, well-being and development opportunities. To give perspective, a four-year undergraduate education at Stanford University costs approximately $276,000. Instead, the money is being squandered on DJJ’s dangerous and poorly designed facilities, which have...

On a cloudy afternoon in the Bayview district, Shaquille, 21, was riding in his sister’s 1991 Acura when another car ran a stop sign, narrowly missing them. Both cars screeched to a halt, and Shaquille and the other driver got out. “I just wanted to talk,” he recalls. But the talk became an argument, and the argument ended when Shaquille sent the other driver to the pavement with a left hook. Later that day, he was arrested and charged with felony assault. He already had a misdemeanor...

San Francisco — The sun was preternaturally bright the day Clare Senchyna’s 26 year-old son Camilo, her only child, was shot and killed in a random act of violence in San Francisco. On that morning two years ago, Ms. Senchyna drew the orange curtains in her bedroom, pulled up her blankets and stayed in bed for much of the next several months. It seemed to her an appropriate response to the end of the world. Her son, an emergency medical technician, had been out celebrating the completion of...

One in every 5 of the Los Angeles Community College District’s 230,000 students is homeless, and nearly two-thirds can’t afford to eat properly, according to a new survey commissioned by the system’s board of trustees. The study looked at students with unstable housing and ”food insecurity,” which is defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as lacking enough to eat to sustain an active, healthy life. Nearly half the L.A. community college students surveyed reported struggling with high...

by Edward Schor, MD, Senior Vice President at the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health The importance of social factors in determining individuals’ health status and their use of health care services has been receiving increasing attention. A recent report from the Bipartisan Policy Center suggests that opportunities to control health care costs reside primarily in addressing patients’ social and behavioral care needs. The report lays out the arguments for integrating social and...

Despite three warnings and a multimillion-dollar fine a few years ago, Kaiser Permanente still fails to provide members with appropriate access to mental health care, according to a recent survey of the HMO by the state of California. The routine survey, released by the state Department of Managed Health Care, found that Kaiser Foundation Health Plan did not provide enrollees with “timely access” to behavioral health treatment , in violation of state law. (Kaiser Health News, which produces...

The felony arrest rate among African American/black youth in 2015 was substantially higher than other racial and ethnic groups in California. At 24 arrests per 1,000 youth, the rate among this group is about 8 times higher than the felony arrest rate among white youth. Encouragingly, nearly all of the 21 counties with data have seen improvements in felony arrest rates for African American/black youth over the past 17 years. Since 1998, San Francisco County saw a particularly sharp, though...

GK note: Check out a new report from Patrick Gardner, Founder of Young Minds Advocacy. See a critique of the report from Scott Bryant-Comstock of the Children's Mental Health Network (which is a good weekly blog if want to stay current on these issues: http://cmhnetwork.org) Patrick Gardner, Founder of Young Minds Advocacy. has written an excellent report on the state of the child mental health delivery system in California. If there ever was a blueprint for a systems of care approach, this...

Seattle and San Francisco began raising their hourly minimum wage to $15 in 2015. Now Washington, D.C. , and New York City are following their lead, and Democratic leaders in Congress have endorsed a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2024. [For more of this story, written by Joseph Darius Jaafari, go to http://nationswell.com/raising-minimum-wage-15/] Read more: http://nationswell.com/raising-minimum-wage-15/#ixzz4kb1baCGa

As part of the Legislature’s ongoing effort to improve mental health services to K-12 students, lawmakers are considering setting aside $15 million a year to fund a pilot program to help schools hire their own specialists. AB 254 by Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, D-Richmond, is intended to close gaps in the ‘whole child’ approach to education. “Given the inextricable relationship between education and health, if the State of California seeks to lead in education we must also focus on the...

If you registered for 4CA's Policymaker Education Day, you should have received a confirmation (looks like what is included below). If you did NOT receive confirmation please email Sara at smarques@centerforyouthwellness.org> And if you are interested in attending, there is still space. You can register at: http://www.4cakids.org/education-day/ Thank you for registering for the 4CA Policymaker Education Day on Childhood Adversity on July 11, 2017. Your registration has been confirmed! As...

An ancient spiritual practice is helping rehabilitate men and women at the Santa Barbara County Jail. Prison Yoga Santa Barbara (PYSB) invites inmates to practice yoga, meditation and mindfulness during incarceration at no cost to taxpayers. Ginny Kuhn is the force behind the non-profit staffed by volunteers. The program is modeled after The Prison Yoga Project which was started yogi James Fox at California’s San Quentin State Prison 15 years ago. Kuhn's motto for PYSB is 'Working Freedom...