Blog

Pediatricians and school nurses are powerful partners when we intentionally collaborate to improve the continuity of care in the populations we serve. It is the intentionality of relationship building that can bear the most fruitful outcomes to improve the health and well-being of our most vulnerable population, our children. We are far more effective working in concert than in our silos. School communities are looking for guidance, answers, and action to address the explosion of...

Tucked inside last week’s state budget deal was some good news for California’s school discipline reform advocates — an additional $15 million for tackling issues such as bullying and trauma students have experienced, and training teachers and administrators in alternatives to traditional approaches to discipline. The $15 million will go to both the Orange County Department of Education and the Butte County Department of Education, which will contract with a college or university to develop...

Many students face barriers to healthy social, emotional, and academic development, but a range of strategies can help overcome those barriers. The Issue Social and emotional learning (SEL) equips young people with competencies to lead productive and healthy lives. There are barriers, however, that prevent many students of color and other marginalized youth from developing social and emotional competencies. For all students to benefit, SEL must be grounded in a larger context of equity and...

The Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative, designed and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was a multiyear effort to dramatically improve student outcomes by increasing students' access to effective teaching. Participating sites adopted measures of teaching effectiveness (TE) that included both a teacher's contribution to growth in student achievement and his or her teaching practices assessed with a structured observation rubric. The TE measures were to be...

https://medium.com/@drjimwalters/hacking-the-principals-office-in-a-trauma-informed-school-environment-5531f255ac5b

According to researchers from San Diego State University and University of California, Los Angeles, Sacramento schools disproportionately suspend black boys. The researchers’ new study, “The Capitol of Suspensions: Examining the Racial Exclusion of Black Males in Sacramento County,” revealed that the schools with the worst record are right here in the state capital: The Sacramento City Unified School District has suspended more black boys than any other district in the state—including Los...

"Adverse experiences in infancy and toddlerhood: Relations to adaptive behavior and academic status in middle childhood", will be published in the August issue of the journal Child Abuse and Neglect . The study, conducted by University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences researchers Lorraine McKelvey, Nikki Edge, Glenn R. Mesman, and Leanne Whiteside-Mansell, along with Arizona State University researcher Robert H. Bradley, collected and analyzed interview data from a sample of low-income...

Thanks to the ever-present media and and rise in social media use, people across the economic spectrum are seeing dramatic examples of racism in our society in clear video. We’re talking about Black men shot for no reason, youth sentenced to disproportionate sentences and customers being arrested for sitting in a coffee shop, to name a few. Similarly, we are beginning to hear and understand the dramatic stories of our most vulnerable young people, young people who have been victimized,...

Childhood bullying can have lasting harmful effects on kids, lowering their self-esteem and causing some to become suicidal when left unchecked. It’s crucially important for parents, teachers, and other adults to get involved and fight back when it comes to children being bullied. Bullies have a tendency to pick on children who have deformities or disabilities. Sometimes the bullies themselves have their own, similar issues and tease others so as to feel better about themselves. Whatever the...

Crowded classrooms, hectic teaching schedules and rowdy students have teachers across the country looking for ways to keep their classrooms calm. That may be one reason mindfulness programs have become so popular. Mindfulness can be practiced in many ways, but at its core mindfulness is self-awareness, a way for students to ground themselves in the moments, creating space to better understand and manage their feelings. Mindfulness has become a core social and emotional learning strategy in...

While in high school, Sarah founded Project VOICE, an organisation which uses spoken word poetry to improve literacy, promote empowerment, and encourage empathy and vulnerability in the classroom. Through workshops and performances, she and her colleagues instil in the students a desire to share and listen to each other’s stories, while showing them that it’s okay to be affected by emotion. “I think the only way people become willing to be vulnerable is if it’s modelled to them,” she tells...

"Even though I was getting A's and B's, mostly A's, in all my classes — all my honors classes — I still felt it wasn't good enough," Savannah says. No matter how well she did, someone else was doing better. "The pressure I put on myself was out of control," she says. She says she felt the pressure all around her — from peers, teachers and her parents. Newfound awareness of these kinds of struggles, has started a conversation — and new initiatives — in her community. A group of parents is...