It was almost a ritual, but one that regularly disrupted the parenting class at a San Francisco-based child abuse prevention organization. Every time a siren blared in the streets below, a female participant bolted out of the room to seek safety in the windowless interior rooms of the multilevel labyrinthine white Victorian that houses Safe & Sound . Molly Jardiniano And it didn’t just happen in the parenting class. “When she heard the fire trucks, she said she would become paralyzed,...

After 10 years of hiding under bushes, down dank alleys and bouncing in and out of crowded homeless shelters, Sabrina Jones had had enough. The street counselor who’d been bugging her since last year to give San Francisco’s Mission Street Navigation Center a try won out. Jones went in. More than a month later, she is free of heroin, getting therapy for depression, and is lined up for supportive housing. At 49, with her first two grandchildren recently born, Jones would like to be part of...

According to an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle , residential retreats aimed at developing leadership and empathy in high school students are using questionable methods such as asking participants to reenact racist behavior, shout degrading slurs at one another and divulge family trauma. While some students say the camp experiences are transformative, the investigation finds the teaching methods suspect, unethical and possibly harmful. A San Jose judge has now called for the Bay...