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By Dorothy Roberts, Photo: iStock, The Washington Post, April 15, 2022 The U.S. Children’s Bureau describes the child welfare system as “a group of services designed to promote the well-being of children by ensuring safety, achieving permanency, and strengthening families.” But developments like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s recent instructions to state agencies to investigate gender-affirming medical care as possible child abuse have helped to shatter the system’s benevolent veneer. Many people...

By Aditi Ranaswami, Photo: Joy Asico/AP, The Lever, April 21, 2022 Welcome to the Cheat Sheet, The Lever’s weekly feature exclusively for our supporting subscribers that quickly gets you up to speed on a pressing news matter. Each week, we will show you exactly what you need to know — including vital information corporate media is trying to cheat you out of learning. Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Nothing is certain except death and taxes.” The founding father would have been wise to add...

By Katherine E Marçal and Kathryn Maguire-Jack, Photo: fizkes/Shutterstock, Housing Matters, April 20, 2022 Families of color and those with low incomes face high risk of experiencing housing cost burden, eviction, and housing instability. Housing instability can create challenges for adolescents, including higher levels of depression and psychological challenges, as well as behavioral issues. It can also cause increased interactions with other social systems, like the child welfare and...

By Abené Clayton, Photo: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters, The Guardian, April 19, 2022 In the first year of the pandemic, homicides throughout the US increased by 30%, the most dramatic one-year rise since the FBI began keeping crime data. The increase was driven by a significant rise in gun violence, with shootings ticking up in cities big and small, in states led by Republicans and Democrats alike. Since then, curbing the rise in shootings has become a central topic among candidates vying for...

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I am not much different from my students. I hate Saturday School when I have to get out of bed to be back in the building that exhausted me the week before, but I love it after I get there and have meaningful interactions with students in a more casual environment. Like this one: "Hey Ida B. Wells!" I greet a student. "I like it when you call me that!" she replies. "Do you remember why I started calling you that?" "Yea. Cuz you said I was outspoken and had a lot of strong opinions about...

By Amanda Winn, 4/21/22, https://positiveexperience.org/category/blog/ Over the summer, the HOPE National Resource Center started a Train the Facilitator program. The goal was to train staff from organizations to present the basics of HOPE to both members of their organizations and to their community partners. Members who go through all three sessions of the program become certified HOPE facilitators. By January, there was enough interest in the program for the HOPE National Resource Center...

By Andrew Joseph, Photo: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images, STAT, April 12, 2022 A fter staying flat for a decade, the overdose death rate among U.S. adolescents nearly doubled from 2019 to 2020 — an alarming climb that continued into 2021, a study released Tuesday showed. The reasons do not include a surge of children in this group — ages 14 to 18 — using drugs, researchers said. If anything, survey data indicate that fewer teens experimented with drugs during the pandemic. Rather, a main factor...

By Simon Appolloni, Image: Pixabay, Phys Org, April 19, 2022 As they become more exposed to the grim realities of climate change, today's teens and people in their 20s— an entire generation —are experiencing increased anxiety, grief, fear or guilt about the planet's future as well as their own. For teachers of environmental studies, softening the scientific evidence about what lies ahead —in terms of sea-level rise and the increased intensity, duration and frequency of storms, droughts and...

By Kyle Swenson, Photo: Nathan Morgan/The Washington Post, The Washington Post, April 18, 2022 It was Friday, and for more than a decade, Fridays had been when the food deliveries arrived. Around 15,000 pounds of food were expected this morning. Volunteers were hauling the first boxes off a truck. Stacy Downey, 52, was determined, if possible, to treat this day like any other, so she was now standing outside the Little Food Pantry That Could, shoulders hunched against the morning cold,...

By Ezra Klein, Photo: Melina Mara/The Washington Post/Getty Images, The New York Times, April 17, 2022 “We said we wouldn’t accept the levels of child poverty we have as a permanent feature of our democracy,” Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, told me. “And not only did the world not come to an end, but the families I talked to, who spent the money on everything from school clothes to a bicycle, were relieved of stress. That was the word they used with me. They were relieved of...

April is National Child Abuse Prevention month. For the entire month of April, co-hosts Ingrid Cockhren, CEO of PACEs Connection, and Mathew Portell, director of communities, will examine America's history of child abuse and neglect and outline how this history connects to our current child abuse crisis. In part three of this series of episodes dedicated to the systemic nature of child abuse and neglect in America, Cockhren and Portell will discuss the different layers of influence embedded...