Blog

One morning before math, the fourth-graders took a little vacation. To soft music, they walked through woods, climbed a mountain and lifted off with imaginary wings, flying over an ocean, a gentle breeze on their faces. One student saw a school of fish; another spotted a rainbow. “I see it!” the others piped in, their eyes squeezed tight. “I see it, too!” With the sound of a chime, they were back in their yellow-and-blue school uniforms in a classroom overlooking a blighted neighborhood that...

After a lifetime of angst and embarrassment, Omar Mateen was on the verge of realizing a longtime dream in the spring of 2007. He was about to graduate from a Florida training academy that would put him on a path to being a police officer. He had left behind his youth as a pudgy, often-bullied kid to become a bulked-up bodybuilder. He was learning how to shoot a gun. Now it was all about to fall apart. At a class barbecue, Mateen told a fellow cadet he was “allergic” to pork, and he got...

When law enforcement leaders convened one October day, it was to draw attention to the alarming rise in violent crime in cities across the U.S. They announced a new report, “A Gathering Storm,” which warned that FBI crime stats had “confirmed our concerns and those of police chiefs that violent crime had dramatically risen,” and “that this trend was ... expanding into other parts of the country.” However, this uptick in crime happened within only one year, which does not a trend make. The...

Illyasha Peete spent the first years of her son’s life listening to his whistling breaths on the pillow next to her. “I was always afraid that he was going to stop breathing at night, so for two years, he slept in the same bed as me,” she said. As a single mother of an asthmatic son in Memphis, Tennessee, Peete worked hard to provide her child with the medical care he needed. Her son took medications, received allergy shots, and used a nebulizer, a machine that pumps vaporized medicine into...

The number of homeless students in the United States has doubled in the past decade. During the 2013-14 school year, more than 1.3 million students were homeless, a 7 percent increase over the previous school year, according to a new report by the advocacy group Civic Enterprises and the polling firm Hart Research Associates. A disproportionate number are students of color or identify as LGBT. As alarming as those numbers are, the fact that figures on homeless students exist at all is a step...

F or the second day in a row in mid-October, René Bross got a call from Ridgeview Elementary about a problem with her 10-year-old son. She feared it was another altercation with his teacher, like the day before. When she arrived this time, she found her son, who is diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, face down on the ground, with the principal and a teacher's aide on top of him. Bross took him away and told the school he was never coming back. She was notified shortly after that her son...

In cultural mythology—the bedrock of which is that all women are instinctively maternal, and that all mothers are loving—the daughter who goes no contact and cuts her mother out of her life is deemed selfish, immature, and ungrateful. I know this firsthand, having divorced my mother at the age of 38; I did not see her again before she died, some thirteen years later. I’ve seen people adjust how they view me —among them, doctors who ask about my mother’s medical history and the look on their...

I love having a dead dad. For the first time in my life I know where he is on Father’s Day. He is not homeless, alcoholic, absent or violent. He is no longer wandering the streets. He's not cold or hungry. He isn’t drunk and baking in the heat on a sidewalk. He's not in pain. He’s not causing pain. He can't break hearts or bones or promises. He is not a question mark, a threat or a worry. I have always hated Father’s Day. Having a homeless father is hard. Having a dead one is much easier.

Public schoolchildren in Michigan are now required to learn about the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide as part of their social studies curriculum, according to a law Governor Rick Snyder signed on Tuesday. While most students in Michigan no doubt learn about the Holocaust already, the new law would require teachers in public schools to spend a certain amount of time on these topics. Between eighth and 12th grades, schools must spend a combined six hours on genocide education, specifically...

Qais Munhazim woke up early on Sunday at his home in Minneapolis for Suhoor—the prayer and pre-dawn meal that sustains fasting Muslims until sundown during the holy month of Ramadan. Before heading back to bed, the 31-year-old Ph.D student checked his phone, and read that while he had been asleep, the worst shooting in U.S. history had occurred. As he read the details of how a U.S. citizen of Afghan descent named Omar Mateen opened fire at a gay club in Orlando, ultimately killing 49 and...

Ask conservatives what the poor need to do to get out of poverty, and the answer usually involves something like, “Get a job.” That was the crux of the anti-poverty plan Paul Ryan revealed last week to shrugs, and has been the gist of many anti-poverty efforts over the past two decades. But for many people, there is one very specific—and often overlooked—reason why that’s not so easy: They don't have a driver's license. Not all jobs require a driver’s license, particularly those that pay...

This essay was written by Mary Sharrow, a Peace4Tarpon board member. My daughter, Candace, taught 5th then 3rd grade at an inner city Baltimore elementary school through Teach For America. It was trial by fire her first year, as this was a struggling school and many students had a trauma history. It is Teach For America’s mission to place teachers in the most needy schools. Candace was very enthusiastic, but didn’t know much about trauma and its effects, other than what she intuitively felt...