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Website: Children's Mental Health Network Info: The Children’s Mental Health Network provides weekly news and unbiased analysis of key issues focused on children, youth and families’ mental health and well-being. The Network reaches a widely diverse audience. Readers and contributors to the Network come from all walks of life – parents, youth, community leaders, policy-makers, state and federal officials, and increasingly, similar groups from countries across the globe. Common among all who...

Website: Child Trauma Academy Info: CTA is a not-for-profit organization based in Houston, Texas working to improve the lives of high-risk children through direct service, research and education. We recognize the crucial importance of childhood experience in shaping the health of the individual, and ultimately, society. By creating biologically-informed child and family respectful practice, programs and policy, CTA seeks to help maltreated and traumatized children. Founded: 1990 Link: ...

Website: The Center on the Developing Child - Harvard University Info: The Center on the Developing Child’s diverse activities align around building an R&D (research and development) platform for science-based innovation, and transforming the policy and practice landscape that supports and even demands change. We do this because society pays a huge price when children do not reach their potential, because half a century of policies and programs have not produced breakthrough outcomes,...

Drawn in by the headline, " This superintendent has figured out how to make school work for poor kids ", I could hardly believe what I was reading. I am not entirely sure how easily replicable the funding strategy is, but it would certainly be worth the effort to bring Superintendent Anderson’s approach to national scale. I am so impressed by this model. It represents an enactment of what recent (and historical, really) research has indicated : that mental health issues, including the...

Threats from alleged terrorists, some more widely publicized than others, have now been sent to school districts in San Francisco, Long Beach, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Dallas, Houston, New York and Los Angeles, as of Thursday. No matter that each threat has been investigated and found to be not credible. Whether targeted or not, school districts are being asked to respond to what Jeff Godown, chief of the Oakland School Police Department, earlier this week called “an air of anxiety in...

The first time I heard a preschooler explaining a classmate’s disruptive behavior, I was surprised at how adult her 4-year-old voice sounded. Her classmate “doesn’t know how to sit still and listen,” she said to me, while I sat at the snack table with them. He couldn’t learn because he couldn’t follow directions, she explained, as if she had recently completed a behavioral assessment on him. Months before either of these children would start kindergarten,...

This is a free video training resource designed to give anyone who works with children important trauma-focused information about how student learning and behavior is impacted by trauma and how educators and support staff can help students develop a...

Advocacy organizations that provide policy, defend children and provide information about trauma-informed schools. If you recommend any others besides those listed here, please leave a comment in this blog post with a link and/or information.

All of these practices and frameworks are -- or should be -- informed by the new knowledge about the unified science of human development, aka ACEs writ large, or NEAR science. This encompasses the epidemiology of adverse childhood experiences (ACE studies), the neurobiology of toxic stress, the biomedical and epigenetic consequences of toxic stress, and resilience research.   Frameworks and Models Attachment, Self-Regulation and Competency (ARC) Source: The Trauma Center at the...

Reports and research about how ACEs affect schoolchildren, or about how schools become trauma-informed, or the outcomes of integrating trauma-informed and resilience-building practices in schools. If you recommend any others besides those listed here, please leave a comment with a link and/or information.

  School suspension rates have fallen in California for students of every ethnicity in the last three years, a sign that a shift in discipline practices in many school districts is starting to have an effect, according to  a study...

In October a video showing a senior deputy yank a student from her seat and flip her desk at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina went viral on the Internet. This incident gained wide national attention and demonstrates the need for...