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Here are three questions that USC Rossier professor, Ron Avi Astor, suggest schools ask themselves about student safety. Secondly, this educator guide, created by USC Rossier's ME in school counseling online program, discusses how school staff can balance school security and school climate. These were created in a response to the Parkland shooting to spark conversations around school safety and gun violence prevention in schools. You can read more HERE .

Arne Duncan, the former education secretary under President Barack Obama, has always been more candid than others who’ve served in that role. He’s often used his platform to talk about what he sees as the persistent socioeconomic and racial disparities in access to quality schools. His new book, How Schools Work: An Inside Account of Failure and Success From One of the Nation’s Longest-Serving Secretaries of Education, further cements that reputation. How Schools Work’s first chapter is...

As teachers, I think it is a safe assumption that we all want what is best for our students and families. What we know is that not all students are successful in school, even life. Some students make us so frustrated, we can hardly stand them. We want them to succeed, why don’t they want to succeed, too? Fortunately, we are learning much about how stressors early in life and throughout development can change the way a person’s brain forms, which can significantly change the way she interacts...

Every family enjoys its stories . Several years ago, mine had its “Home Alone” moment. My brother, his wife and their two children were visiting my parents in New Jersey. They agreed to head out to dinner – in two cars – to a restaurant about 45 minutes away. When everyone arrived at the restaurant, they all jokingly asked where one of my nephews was, assuming he was in the other car. Only after a few long seconds passed did they realize that they had accidentally left him behind! My nephew...

Engaging resistant children and parents in trauma treatment is difficult at best. Traditionally, engagement and rapport building begins in the first face-to-face session. But more often than not it’s a harsh start-up. Join us for a free webinar to learn techniques to quickly put parents at ease and excited to attend treatment.

Thought you all might be interested in this model of trauma informed response to children going through incidents involving law enforcement being implemented in West Virginia. If a law enforcement officer encounters a child during a call, that child’s name and three words, HANDLE WITH CARE , are forwarded to the school/child care agency before the school bell rings the next day. The school implements individual, class and whole school trauma-sensitive curricula so that traumatized children...

Devan Southerland knows she wants to purchase a home in Baltimore City. She is cautious, though, after hearing about how predatory lenders disproportionately targeted minority homebuyers a decade ago. "I just want to be smart about it," Southerland says. "Because I know a lot of black people suffered during the whole housing crisis and whole subprime lending issue that happened a few years ago." In the historic Baltimore neighborhood of Bolton Hill, Southerland and her 10-year-old son, Liam,...

When Kentucky state Treasurer Allison Ball and a colleague talked with high school seniors last year about credit cards and other pieces of the personal finance puzzle, something wasn’t right. “We kept using the word ‘interest’ and we kept getting blank stares,” Ball recalled. Finally, she asked the students who knew what interest is. No one did. “Here they were, about to be adults, two weeks before graduation — and they had no idea about interest on credit card payments,” said Ball, a...

Young children are far more vulnerable to climate-related disasters and the onus is on adults to provide the protection and care that children need. In a paper published in PLoS Medicine, researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia University Irving Medical Center set out some specific challenges associated with the impacts of climate change on the world's 2.3 billion children and suggest ways to address their under-prioritized needs. "Children and...

Excess traffic, unmitigated pollution, a lack of green space: These problems aren’t unique to Barcelona. But the city’s answer is. Superblocks—40-acre, tic-tac-toe sections of the street grid that the city has transformed into pedestrian-first environments—have shot the Catalonian capital to the cutting edge of urban design since Mayor Ada Colau took office in 2015. Drawing inspiration from the city’s historic plan, Colau centered her transportation policy platform around wide-scale...

When the American Medical Association — one of the nation’s most powerful health care groups — met in Chicago this June, its medical student caucus seized an opportunity for change. Though they had tried for years to advance a resolution calling on the organization to drop its decades-long opposition to single-payer health care, this was the first time it got a full hearing. The debate grew heated — older physicians warned their pay would decrease, calling younger advocates naïve to...

On HBO’s “ Sharp Objects ,” Amy Adams plays a reporter named Camille, who returns to her hometown, Wind Gap, Mo., to investigate a series of child murders. Camille, a journalist in search of her big break, is also an alcoholic who drives around drinking vodka from Evian bottles, a former hometown It Girl and a cutter . At the end of the first episode, as she sinks into a hot bath, her skin is revealed to be a thicket of scar tissue. The show’s subplot of self-harm casts light upon an often...