March 2016

Echo Parenting & Education Changing the Paradigm Conference 2016 “See it, believe it, act on it!” That was the exhortation at the end of the Building Trauma-Informed Schools & Communities conference last week. Around 250 people gathered to share experiences, best practices, questions and dreams as Echo hosted the first ever national conference on trauma-informed schools. We were fortunate to have many extraordinary thought leaders, including Dr. Ross Greene “Lost at School” and “The...

A hearing will be held April 2 on Alaska House Concurrent Resolution 21 (HCR 21) to respond to adverse childhood experiences. The resolution is very similar to those passed in Wisconsin and California . Testimony will be heard in the Health and Social Services Committee on the bill introduced by Representative Geran Tarr. In her statement about the bill , Tarr calls on Governor Walker “to establish policy and programs to address the public and behavioral health epidemic of adverse childhood...

Often shouted in anger or groaned in disdain, the question “What’s wrong with you?!” rarely leads to an honest answer about a person’s life or experiences. That’s because it’s the wrong question to ask and the answer is complicated. A new pilot program in Black Hawk County hopes to change that interaction between two people, and in turn, create a stronger community and healthier children. The community-based child abuse prevention response to ACEs, or adverse childhood experiences, project...

Jeffrey Pendleton was found dead in a jail cell in Manchester, New Hampshire, on March 13. His death can be chalked up to a number of issues: the paradox of overbearing yet negligent policing, America’s addiction to criminalizing the poor and homeless, the uninhabitable conditions of local jails , and how cities make bank from those paradoxes, bigotries and conditions. His death also illuminates how the ridiculously paltry wages inside the food-service sector leave its workers vulnerable to...

Say you have a problem child. If it’s a toddler, maybe he smacks his siblings. Or she refuses to put on her shoes as the clock ticks down to your morning meeting at work. If it’s a teenager, maybe he peppers you with obscenities during your all-too-frequent arguments. The answer is to punish them, right? Not so, says Alan Kazdin, director of the Yale Parenting Center. Punishment might make you feel better, but it won’t change the kid’s behavior. Instead, he advocates for a radical technique...

Last week, the New York City Council passed a number of changes to the city's zoning code, including a mandatory inclusionary housing provision that will require new private housing developments built in the city to permanently include units for low-income renters. The changes were proposed by Mayor Bill de Blasio as part of his administration's affordable housing initiative, and are intended to ease the city's affordable housing crisis. The administration describes the housing plan as "a...

Mike Lamb, Washington, DC Executive Director of Turnaround for Children , alerted me to this interesting Cover Story in The Christian Science Monitor about how Scott Gordon, chief executive officer of Mastery Charter Schools comprised of 21 charter schools in Philadelphia, has shifted his “no excuses” approach to a “trauma-informed” approach to discipline. The article by Sarah Garland reports: Classrooms and hallways are still orderly, but suspension is now a last resort. Mastery instead...

About 406,000 Texans with mental illness and substance abuse disorders could have health insurance if the state expanded Medicaid, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Monday. Texas is one of 20 states that have not expanded Medicaid coverage, opting out of many provisions of the Affordable Care Act. “Today’s report shows that Medicaid expansion is an important step Texas can take to address behavioral health needs, including serious mental illness...

Amanda Hensley started abusing prescription painkillers when she was just a teenager. For years, she managed to function and hold down jobs. She even quit opioids for a while when she was pregnant with her now 4-year-old son. But she relapsed. Hensley says she preferred drugs like Percocet and morphine, but opted for heroin when she was short on cash. By the time she discovered she was pregnant last year, she couldn't quit. "It was just one thing after another, you know — I was sick with...

How do you fix a problem if you don't know its size? Many states — including some that have been hardest hit by the opioid crisis — don't know how many of their youngest residents each year are born physically dependent on those drugs. They rely on estimates. Pennsylvania is one of those states. Ted Dallas , head of Pennsylvania's Department of Human Services, calls the information he's working with "reasonably good." "Data is never pristine when you're dealing with 2.7 million people," he...

“What are you hiding?” the elder asked Rose Domnick. It was a simple question in response to Domenic’s request for help overcoming her mysteriously growing, incapacitating fear. But Domenic was stunned by the query and involuntarily blurted out that she had been sexually abused repeatedly as a child. Now in her 50s, she had told no one except a visiting Catholic priest who’d come to her Yup’ik village church many years ago. “When I was 11 years old, I told this priest about the abuse...

The authorities have released pictures of men implicated in the Brussels bombings, one of brusswhom is thought to be still at large. But does the current media analysis mislead as to who is ultimately responsible? A new study, recently published by Sofia Pinero Kluch from the Gallup public opinion research company, based in Washington, DC, and Alan Vaux, a psychologist at Southern Illinois University, USA, has uncovered some novel and even shocking findings, in a survey of attitudes to...