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Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, wrote in her annual message this year that “Building a Culture of Health in America…is much like assembling a quilt. It requires many hands working together. And often, the most unlikely pairings create the most evocative designs.” Over the next few months, the Shared Learnings series will explore the unconventional partnerships that lend power to the 14 community ACE & resilience networks participating in...

Hi, Coach! Congratulations on your recent induction into The Des Moines Sunday Register Iowa Sports Hall of Fame. The honor, of course, is well-deserved. I’ve written many times that you and your friends and longtime assistants, Jan Jensen and Jenni Fitzgerald, are some of the finest people I’ve ever met. I wanted to take a moment to tell you why. We met when I was 19 years old, a sophomore at Drake University during the 1994-95 academic year. I was the sports editor of the student...

The precocious teen who’s too cool for school—earning high marks despite skipping class—is a pop-culture standard, the idealized version of an effortless youth for whom success comes easy. Too bad it’s largely a work of fiction that belies a much harsher reality: Missing just two days a month of school for any reason exposes kids to a cascade of academic setbacks, from lower reading and math scores in the third grade to higher risks of dropping out of high school, research suggests. A new...

Trauma-Informed Instruction: The new foundation for a positive school climate Please join us for a free one-hour webinar next week on Trauma-Informed Instruction for K-12 educators and administrators. We hope you'll consider joining us on Wednesday, September 7th at 2:00pm Eastern. In this webinar, Leora Wolf-Prusan, Ed.D. (School Climate & Student Support Specialist at WestEd) and Lara Kain (Senior Director of Transform Schools at Los Angeles Education Partnership) will discuss: The...

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Amy Kennedy, education director of the Kennedy Forum, speaks to more than 300 teachers and staff of the Plainfield School District during their orientation Monday morning. Jaclyn Diaz/NorwichBulletin. Editor’s note: Amy Kennedy spoke at the May 17, 2015 pre-premiere of “Paper Tigers” —a joint event of ACEs Connection and the Kennedy Forum. PLAINFIELD (CT) - While some students are concerned about the right answer on a test or making the basketball team, other students deal with more...

This story is part of a series from NPR Ed exploring the challenges U.S. schools face meeting students' mental health needs. Every year, thousands of children are suspended from preschool. Take a second to let that sink in. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 6,743 children who were enrolled in district-provided pre-K in 2013-14 received one or more out-of-school suspensions. And that's just public pre-K. Still more children were likely suspended from the nation's many...

“I’m tired of all the shootings,” yelled Zaair, a high school sophomore at Barringer High School in Newark, New Jersey. A small group of students were in the middle of an important brainstorming session. “Yeah, me too. It’s all over the place,” said another student. They were discussing ideas for a ServiceWorks community project. Other options had come up, but talk kept coming back to gun violence. It’s a grave topic with an enormity that can be hard to grasp, much less address. And the...

At Bell Central School Center in Pineville, rated “distinguished” in the Kentucky accountability system, principal Greg Wilson said parents of misbehaving students often request that their children be paddled instead of getting suspended and losing time in the classroom. Corporal punishment, or paddling, is fading as a disciplinary method in Kentucky public schools, dropping from 3,075 incidents in 2005 to 574 in 2015, according to the latest available data. But Bell County is among 25...

Childhood bullying inflicts the same long-term psychological trauma on girls as severe physical or sexual abuse, suggests a new survey of college students. The study, which involved 480 college freshmen through seniors, indicated that the detrimental effects of bullying may linger for years, negatively affecting victims’ mental health well into young adulthood. While most of the scholarship on bullying has focused on kindergarten through 12th-grade students, the struggles revealed by college...

Although it can be difficult to admit as a psychologist, talk therapy does not work for everyone. In fact, some critics of psychotherapy would argue that it does not even work for the majority of people. I can see the validity in the arguments by these critics. I have always been a firm believer that talking to a friend, family member or spiritual leader can be as effective as working with a professional therapist. In fact, some research has shown this to be the case, particularly among...

In my four decades as a physician, I have seen the path of destruction that addiction leaves on individuals, families and communities. I have served patients from Connecticut to California. From Appalachia to the Navajo, Apache, Sioux and Hopi reservations. From Eskimos in Alaska to the Shuar people in the Amazon jungle. And, now from rural West Tennessee to urban and suburban Memphis. My calling and my passion have grown out of the awareness of how addiction affects all of public health.

Employment is often a requirement to qualify for many federal assistance programs geared toward poor young families, but a new study shows that people who need the most help often have overwhelmingly high levels of adversity and exposure to violence that can limit their success in the workplace. With so many challenges faced by young families in poverty, the researchers assert that safety net programs should also integrate services that address trauma. The study, conducted by the Center for...