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Today's Press Democrat featured this promising article: "Sonoma County supervisors Tuesday created a new government office to help the region bounce back from this year’s devastating wildfires and assist with charting a formal vision for the long-term recovery of the local housing supply, the economy and other key areas. The new Office of Recovery and Resiliency will have its own budget and seven staff members, three of whom will come from the ranks of current county employees. Housed within...

Last month, California’s top education official announced suspensions have been cut in half since five years ago, and expulsions are down more than 40 percent. The state has encouraged these reductions as mounting evidence has shown out-of-school suspensions and expulsions do more harm than good. But the story behind the numbers is complicated. As schools stop relying on suspensions and expulsions to discipline students, some struggle to find other ways to keep bad behavior in check. At one...

It’s no surprise to learn that the cost to live in Kern County is lower than many other places in California. But a recent study by the non-partisan California Budget and Policy Center offers a twist on what locals already know about the place they live. The study looked at the cost to support a family in California, breaking out data about each of the state’s counties. A family living on minimum wage still can’t make enough to buy into the average family’s life, she said. And that’s one of...

Walk around the Kern River Valley, Oildale and parts of Bakersfield any day and you’ll see hopelessness. There’s the homeless wandering the streets, junkies searching for a fix and punishing poverty that lurks in almost every neighborhood. For years, we’ve known there’s something cyclical about poverty, chronic drug abuse and intergenerational despair. When I learned about a study performed by the California Department of Public Health that found Kern County mothers experienced more...

The Kern County Medically Vulnerable Care Coordination Project was formed in 2008 and has over 50 partner organizations. Our Vision – Use coordinated services to measurably improve outcomes for Kern County infants and children, prenatal through 5 years of age, who are at risk of costly, lifelong medical and developmental issues. Among the greatest challenges faced by our collaborative case management partners are the long-term effects of childhood trauma on Kern County mothers, fathers and...

Almost 2,000 people died in California last year of opioid overdoses as a sprawling epidemic made its way to the west coast. Where is the death toll the worst? The California mapped out where the state's opioid death rates were the highest in 2016 - and all are in locations that lack Medication Assisted Treatment facilities, which are also mapped here. To read more of Harold Pierce's article, please click here. Harold Pierce covers education and health for The Californian.

With funding from First 5 Kern, Advancing Parenting has placed our fifty parenting tips on the 120 buses and shuttles of G.E.T. in Bakersfield, CA. These tips will be read 1000s of times by 1000s of people of all ages. We call this proactive, passive/public parenting education...a way to prevent adverse childhood experiences. Visit advancingparenting.org to see all of the fifty tips and read about what we do, why we do it, and our plans for the future.

A new one-stop resource center for foster youth will celebrate its expansion by opening a new facility in Downtown Bakersfield on Wednesday. The Dream Center, serving nearly 200 foster children and young adults a week moved to a larger location to better meet the needs of foster youth in Kern County, especially those who are homeless. The resource center is open to current and former foster youth up to 24 years old and is now offering resources like showers, laundry, emergency hygiene...

To see the conference agenda, list of all-star speakers, and to register go to: http://www.theresourceinnovationgroup.org/california-2018-conference/

You can see them printed on the sides of buses, the windows of businesses, and bumper stickers slapped on the tail ends of cars around Bakersfield. ... “Parents take their children to the library regularly and read to them daily, beginning when they’re infants and continue until they’re reading on their own.” “Parents don’t excuse or make excuses for their children’s poor behavior.” “Parents allow their children to make mistakes and see to it they learn from them.” [For more on this story by...

A product of the Essentials for Childhood Initiative (EfC), the Child Adversity and Well-Being Dashboards contain indicators of child adversity, health and well-being utilizing data available on kidsdata.org . For more information about the dashboards, please refer to the California Data Dashboards page. The Kern County Data Dashboard contains select indicators of child adversity and well-being. The dashboard is a product of the Shared Data and Outcomes Workgroup of the California Essentials...

Attached find a downloadable "Helpful Tips" sheet for information about how to do some common tasks on ACEs Connection. You can download and print this document for reference and share with friends and colleagues! You can also find our complete list of "How Tos" as well HERE. If you think anything else you need assistance with on ACEs Connection, feel free to add a comment below. Thank you, Gail