September 2019

By Lolita Lopez, NBC Los Angeles, September 9, 2019 More than a dozen more Los Angeles County Sheriff Department Mental Evaluation teams, or MET teams, hit the streets of the county this week. MET teams, which partner a Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health clinician with a sheriff's deputy, are requested by other deputies or other law enforcement who arrive at a scene and find a person dealing with a mental health crisis. The department says these types of calls that have resulted...

By Alexei Koseff, San Francisco Chronicle, September 11, 2019 The California Legislature has moved to phase out the use of private prisons in the state, giving Gov. Gavin Newsom an opportunity to fulfill a campaign promise. AB32, which would bar California from holding inmates in privately run facilities starting in 2028, received final approval in the Assembly on Wednesday, advancing to the governor’s desk. Newsom, who has not taken a public position on the bill, promised in his January...

September 18, 2019 by TAYLOR SWAAK A s California this month expanded a statewide ban on suspending younger students for defiant behavior, lessons on how this increasingly sweeping school discipline reform may play out can be found in Los Angeles, which barred such suspensions on an even broader scale six years ago. Previously in California, “willful defiance” suspensions were not permitted in grades K-3. Beginning in July 2020, under the new state law , they will be prohibited for students...

Sonoma County ACEs Connection members Allen Nishikawa and Lena Hoffman at California Policymaker Education Day, 2018 Allen Nishikawa, a sansei, or third-generation Japanese American, majored in political science and American history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he participated in antiwar (Vietnam) marches. But it was his experience as a military brat — moving from school to school across the U.S. and even to Japan as a child — that shaped his own childhood experiences and...

By Ricardo Cano, CalMatters, September 17, 2019 Each year, millions of Californians send their children to public K-12 classrooms, assuming that, from around Labor Day to early summer, there will be one given: A school day on a district’s calendar will mean a day of instruction in school. But that fixed point is changing, according to a CalMatters analysis of public school closures. From massive wildfires to mass shooting threats to dilapidated classrooms, the 21st century is disrupting...

By Dom McAndrew, YourCentralValley.com, September 10, 2019 Since the Columbine tragedy in 1999, there have been more than 220 school shootings, killing 144 people and injuring more than 300, according to research by the Washington Post. After the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools held it’s second safety meeting in Downtown Fresno, educators and law enforcement discovered that school shootings can be prevented. “You pray that it doesn’t happen but you do in some cases take a not if but...

By Monica Ortiz Uribe, National Public Radio, September 15, 2019 Many migrants coming to the U.S. to ask for asylum fled violence and political strife at home. This mental toll is largely going unaddressed. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Many migrants traveling to the U.S. to seek asylum are traumatized at every juncture. Our next story includes upsetting details about that trauma. Some migrants are fleeing violence and political strife in their home countries. Some become the targets of gangs...

By Zaidee Stavely, EdSource, September 16, 2019 Kindergartners across California could soon be spending more time in their classrooms if Gov. Gavin Newsom signs a bill approved by the state Legislature last week. The legislation, Assembly Bill 197, introduced by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, would require every public elementary school, including charter schools, to offer at least one kindergarten class the same length as 1st grade, beginning in the 2022-23 school year. Schools...

By Kristen Mitchell, YourCentralValley.com, September 15, 2019 Not every newborn gets to go home from the hospital right away. Those needing extra care at Valley Children’s Hospital also get extra love from cuddlers through a volunteer program. Their job is to hold and cuddle with newborns in the neonatal intensive care unit when their parents can’t be there. One of the roughly 70 cuddlers is Donna Garcia. She snuggles with babies twice a week. [ Please click here to read more .]

By Carmel de Bertaut, Benito Link, September 16, 2019 On September 5, the San Benito County Office of Education hosted Jessie Fuller of Collaborative Learning Solutions for a three-hour workshop on trauma-informed responses in schools. Fuller, a California League of Schools’ Teacher of the Year, spoke to a room of principals, teachers, therapists, and school staff about the causes of stress, ways it can manifest, and solutions to deal with it. With the message of “hurt people, hurt people,”...

By April Dembosky, KQED, September 14, 2019 On her 21st birthday, Keris Myrick was in the cereal aisle of the grocery store. She was throwing boxes of Cheerios on the ground, yelling back at the voices in her head. Food is poison, they told her. If you eat you will die. “So I actually stopped eating for about four months,” Myrick said. “I just told my mother it was stomach pains.” It took years before Myrick admitted the problem was not in her stomach, but in her head. She was eventually...

By Public Affairs UC Berkeley, July 23, 2019 Latina mothers living in the United States experienced a significant jump in preterm births in the nine months following the Nov. 8, 2016, election, according to a study by researchers at UC Berkeley and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The analysis, based on U.S. government data on more than 33 million live births in the country, found an excess of 2,337 preterm births to U.S. Latina mothers, compared to projections about...