Danielle Cook’s oldest son was only 11 years old when he was diagnosed with stage three Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer that affects the immune system. “There was a huge sense of powerlessness and great sadness,” remembers Cook, a mother of three who worked for years as a cooking demonstration instructor in the Washington, D.C., area.
Cook, who now also works as a holistic nutritionist, relentlessly looked for answers in food. After months of making special recipes, she saw her son go from a “worn, depressed, tired kid to a healthy adolescent,” she says. Drawing from her experience, she founded Happily Hungry, a program that consists of cooking workshops geared towards hospitalized kids battling cancer and other illnesses.
Watch the video above to see how Cook helps patients and families deal with some of the negative side effects that accompany various medical treatments.
Tag: Children
These 5 Smart Gun Technologies Could Be the Future of Firearms in America
Would anyone shopping for a new car buy one that wasn’t equipped with seat belts? Live in a house without smoke detectors? Use a chain saw without a safety brake? It goes without saying that consumers expect products to be safe. But when it comes to one of the most deadly objects — a gun, which killed more than 30,000 Americans in 2013 — people are hard-pressed to find one with state-of-the-art safety features.
That’s not because the technology isn’t readily available. Back in 2000, Smith & Wesson agreed to manufacture handguns with a built-in lock, but boycotts curbed sales. More recently, in California and Maryland, stores stocking the leading smart gun in production were met with vicious backlash online, protests and death threats. Some question the reliability of smart guns, and others believe that they threaten the Second Amendment. But Stephen Teret, a policy expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says unequivocally, “Smart guns are going to save lives. They’re not going to save all lives,” he continues, “but why wouldn’t we want to make guns as safe a consumer product as possible?”
Many Americans share his sentiment. In 2014, through the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation, Silicon Valley luminaries like Ron Conway pledged $1 million toward research and development of smart gun technologies, and last month, President Barack Obama signaled his support. Which devices are the most promising? NationSwell interviewed five leading inventors about their prototypes.
TriggerSmart by Robert McNamara
Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology keeps guns from firing when they’re in the wrong hands. TriggerSmart’s small wireless transmitter (disguised inside a ring) “talks” with a circuit board in the firearm’s handle. When they’re within less than two inches of each other, the gun unjams. (The technology works nearly identically to keys that remotely unlock car doors.) And unlike fingerprint recognition, the signal communicates through material, like a glove.
Robert McNamara, founder of the Florida-based company manufacturing the technology, started investigating how to build a smart gun after wondering why he could remotely lock and disable his iPhone, but not his gun. He approaches the issue of gun violence with a foreigner’s eye. Uncomfortable with the regularity of shootings of America, this level of gun violence “doesn’t happen every day in Ireland,” McNamara points out, speaking with the thick brogue of his homeland. “We never hear of a child shooting themselves or their mother, or a police officer being overpowered.” Recognizing that U.S. politics around smart guns are “a bit of a hot potato,” McNamara hopes to capitalize in an industry avoided by many. Previously working in construction and property development, he now spends his days courting big investors with the hopes of soon bringing TriggerSmart into final states of testing.
Dual:Lock by Timothy Oh
Dual:Lock is a throwback to traditional safety measures, but with a contemporary twist. In essence, the device is simply a high-tech, wall-mounted gun safe. Rather than punching in numbers or spinning a dial, the safe opens with a fingerprint scan. Dual:Lock’s stainless steel core looks like a knife block; its carbide retaining pin locks the weapon in place.
With relatives in law enforcement, creator Timothy Oh says that he was raised with an ingrained sense of the devastation gun violence can cause, as well as the importance of firearm safety. The native of Orange County, Calif., and current student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., built his first smart gun in high school. After uploading his idea to an online forum and receiving extremely negative feedback, he started listening to consumers’ desires and conducted 500 interviews with military, law enforcement and civilian gun owners. Many told him that they keep their guns loaded and unsecure in case there’s an emergency. “Immediate access and security are two values that are conflicting right now in the current market,” Oh explains. For these gun owners, Dual:Lock provides faster access than traditional closed-door safes (the device opens within 0.8 seconds). A prototype will be tested at the Los Angeles Police Department gun ranges this fall, and eight gun stores in the Albany, N.Y. region, have signed letters of sale intent.
gUNarmed by Chloe Green
Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, Oikos University, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Umpqua Community College. Fifteen-year-old high school student Chloe Green says she’s read too many news reports about, “children being killed and the families being torn apart by gun violence.” Green comes from a family of gun owners, but thought she could bypass the political divide and enhance “safe, responsible gun ownership” with technology.
Her early-stage device, gUNarmed, will use satellites to track a gun’s location and automatically jam the magazine when inside schools and government buildings. (The owner can program additional excluded areas.) When a firearm is detected in a prohibited space, a motor on the magazine prevents bullets from entering the chamber and could send an alert to local law enforcement. Currently, Green has mapped out the electronics in a breadboard prototype, but she doesn’t know when she will advance to the next stages since her young age makes it difficult to network professionally. Still, she doesn’t plan to let that derail her. “I’ve always been interested in the process of making, tinkering and inventing things,” she says, hoping to save American lives from firearm deaths while also getting other young women involved in STEM.
EverLokt by John William Stein
Pennsylvania resident John William Stein believes that smart guns will only sell if they are attractive to gun owners. The one-time biotech inventor for pharmaceutical companies knew little about firearms, but he was moved into action by the Sandy Hook massacre. (A few weeks after the shooting, dozens of kids walked onstage at his church to sing Christmas carols, and he could only think of the other children who had been lost.) The 75-year-old’s first device was a safety round hooked up with a motion-sensor that pinged parents by cell phone if shaken (a sign that a child or an intruder had found their gun). But that device seemed too simplistic to motivate firearms enthusiasts.
So recently, Stein decided to take advantage of today’s increasingly compact processors and cameras and installed a miniature lens into the head of the bullet. Using its ability to detect distances, this smart bullet would not fire if a person is less than three feet away or if a child is looking down the barrel. At the same time, however, the bullet would release if aimed across a room in the direction of a home invader. Still in the early stages of development, Stein’s bullet could also film the incident for law enforcement, and a second camera in the back could snap a picture upon discharge to show who fired the gun.
Ægen Technologies by Kai Kloepfer
Boulder, Colo., teen Kai Kloepfer describes the 2012 Aurora movie theater mass shooting, where 12 people died at a sold-out midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises,” as feeling like his September 11. The loss of life was close — he had visited the Century 16 theater with his friends — so the self-taught electronics nut who participates annually in the local science fair focused his next project on something socially relevant: creating a smart gun. His first attempt involved iris recognition. But that idea foundered when he realized the sensor would be incompatible with sunglasses, thick eyeglasses or shooting in the dark. The next logical alternative? Fingerprint recognition.
Going on four years later, Kloepfer’s biometric sensor is located on a gun’s grip. It captures an image of a person’s fingerprint and checks it against a database of authorized users. If the system finds a match, the gun unlocks. As soon as the owner releases it, the device relocks — a vital feature if the firearm is used in self-defense or is stolen. “The whole goal is to remove human error from the equation as much as possible,” Kloepfer, now 19, says. Kloepfer’s current 3-D printed plastic model unlocks within a span of 1.5 seconds, but he aims to reduce it to just half a second. Just weeks away from his first live sample, Kloepfer is already a long way ahead of most high school science fair projects.
MORE: This Lifelong Hunter Aims to Make Guns Safer — By Making Them Smarter
How Do You Truly Transform Education in America? Teach This Subject in Grammar Schools
Nothing stops Mike Erwin. A native of Syracuse, N.Y., he enlisted and served in the Army for three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s athletically fit — an endurance runner who’s finished 12 ultra-marathons — and mentally sharp — once a graduate student in psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who later taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He founded Team Red, White & Blue, a nonprofit consisting of 96,500 members in 178 chapters worldwide that enrich veterans’ lives by connecting them to their community through physical activity.
Lately, Erwin has focused on a very unique area than his military pedigree would suggest, but it’s one he believes is vital to the country’s future: How do you teach a second-grader about leadership?
It’s a question Erwin and several elementary school teachers in upstate New York have been contemplating over the past year as part of his latest venture, The Positivity Project. Originally sparked at a discussion group at West Point and later available only as a Facebook page, The Positivity Project now aims to be the defining curriculum for character education in America’s grade schools. (Talks are underway to see it in more than 20 schools across the country by next year.) Amid all the intense pressure to score highly on standardized tests and meet Common Core standards, Erwin is focusing on how public education can mold better citizens.
“I think a lot of people are scared right now. They see the levels of divisiveness. Just read the comments on Facebook threads on an article, they’re angry and negative,” Erwin says. “A lot of parents are looking at that and seeing we have got to create a better society for our children and how they interact with each other.”
Rooted in the concepts of positive psychology — a rigorous, if somewhat new, field of inquiry examining the conditions for happiness — Erwin and the teachers at Morgan Road Elementary School in the Liverpool, N.Y., school district are developing lesson plans based on the two dozen different character strengths at the core of the field, concepts like creativity, love, bravery, teamwork and forgiveness. For 10 to 15 minutes a day, four days a week, the teachings are a simple way to spark discussion in the classroom, a dialogue that’s continued outside of the school grounds via The Positivity Project’s savvy use of social media.
So how does The Positivity Project teach character? The short answer, the teachers say, is a subtle distinction in instruction: Don’t tell kids about behaviors — what they should be doing — and help them realize how their actions affect other people and their own identity — the why behind the behavior. That’s because, when it comes to character, a child is more likely to be respectful if he’s given models of courteous individuals (real or fictional) than if a teacher barks, “Be polite!”
At least that’s how second-grade teacher Amy Figger feels. Before The Positivity Project reinvigorated the school’s strategy for character education, several teachers had dropped it from their day, unwilling to sacrifice 15 minutes that could be used for test-prep skills, she says. But Figger never wavered. “This isn’t about elementary school; this is about something lifelong,” she says.
In her Morgan Road classroom, where she team-teaches 46 students with her colleague Marc Herron, another Positivity Project proponent, she says the focus on 24 character strengths gives them a way to pinpoint unique qualities in each 7-year-old student. “To be a leader, you have these strengths inside of you. Tap into them. And if something’s not your strength, surround yourself with other people to get something done,” Figger says. “You’re not teaching or telling, we’re saying you already have this inside of you. You only need to recognize it.”
Herron notes that character lessons can also help to create a conducive learning environment. Character strengths like curiosity come up in science lessons, and perseverance is noted after hard math problems. With the same lessons taught throughout the school, there’s a stronger sense of community. “We have a common language to use,” Herron says. Sometimes, the character strengths even make their way into faculty meetings, as the educators discuss a student’s progress or their own educational challenges.
Outside Morgan Road Elementary, clinical research seems to give credence to the effect of The Positivity Project on student behavior. Christopher J. Bryan, an assistant professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, concluded that kids between three and six years old were up to 29 percent more likely to assist with a task when they were asked to “be a helper,” compared to children who were asked simply “to help.” Same went for cheating, which was reduced by half when youngsters were told, “Please don’t be a cheater,” compared to the other group, told, “Please don’t cheat.” (Younger children learn more from nouns than verbs.)
A similar study by Joan E. Grusec and Erica Redler, psychologists at the University of Toronto, found that praise was better reinforced when it was tied to a fuller sense of self, rather than an isolated behavior. In an experiment, after giving marbles to other children, some kids were told “it was good that you gave some of your marbles to those poor children. Yes, that was a nice and helpful thing to do.” Others heard: “I guess you’re the kind of person who likes to help others whenever you can. Yes, you are a very nice and helpful person.” When researchers returned weeks later and gave the children another chance to share, those in the latter group was more generous because they felt their actions were essential to being a “nice and helpful person.”
Taken as a whole, the findings suggest that positive reinforcement is not just working Pavlovian tricks on kids. Instead, as soon as children begin to recognize their actions are intrinsically related to who they are, they begin to act with a clearer moral compass.
Erwin steeped himself in this research as a graduate student at the University of Michigan under one of positive psychology’s co-founders, Dr. Chris Peterson, the co-author (along with Martin Seligman) of the influential text “Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification.” As a professor at West Point teaching about leadership, Erwin took heart in Peterson’s fundamental idea, “other people matter,” and invited him to speak to his students. But three weeks before the engagement, Peterson died of a heart attack.
Erwin grappled with how to memorialize Peterson’s legacy as he got Team Red, White & Blue — a organization Peterson inspired Erwin to create — up and running, On the side, he started a Facebook page that collected inspirational quotes on character strengths, drawing from the archives of Peterson’s research into how these ideals persisted back to ancient times: Plato, Aristotle, Sun Tsu and Lao Tsu. In March 2015, Herron, an old buddy, reached out to Erwin about the social media account, telling Erwin he loved sharing the quotes with his second graders. After more conversation about how the ideas could translate for young, The Positivity Project began.
Fitting with the times, Erwin’s curriculum has a special focus on technology and social media. Each classroom has a Twitter feed, where the teacher posts quotes that reinforce discussion and model good behavior online. Erwin concedes this focus is also a convenient marketing tool, spreading The Positivity Project’s message across the Internet. But his intentions are deeper. “We’re not very mature in how we [as a society] use our social media and technology. All this change has been thrust upon us so rapidly,” he says. “We need to make sure that we’re talking to our kids about being good people and about their strengths. Before you hit send on something or repost something or text something, okay, am I stopping to think what this is going to do to somebody?”
It all goes back to Peterson’s original message: Have I remembered that other people matter?
Why Helping Humanity Should Be Core to Learning
There are enormous push and pull forces emerging in education and something is going to have to give. The push force is the fact that traditional schooling is boring, and the more you go up the grade levels, the more boring it becomes. By the time you reach grades 9 or 10 only about a third of all students are engaged. The pull forces include the allure of explosive technology having a life of its own. This tension — between the dullness of schooling and the unbridled expansion of technology — makes the status quo untenable.
There is a way to escape this, one that I explored in report form with Maria Langworthy in “A Rich Seam: How New Pedagogies Find Deep Learning” which was published by Pearson in 2014. We’ve now extended this enquiry with over 500 schools in seven countries, that we are working with as part of our New Pedagogies for Deep Learning (NPDL) initiative.*
We are helping clusters and networks of schools implement deep learning outcomes that we define as the 6Cs:
- Character education
- Citizenship
- Collaboration
- Communication
- Creativity
- Critical thinking
Moreover, as in “The Rich Seam,” we are working with school and system partners to establish the conditions and strategies at the local and state level to support NPDL in action. It is in the early stages, but we are discovering that students themselves are agents of change. They are catalysts for changing teaching and learning; they are also partners in changing the school and forces for change in society itself. In a very real sense, they are intergenerational change agents.
For example, our partner schools in Uruguay were given simple robotic kits with instructions via YouTube. The kits sat on the shelf until one day the students, which are 10 years old, asked the teacher if they could start to use them.
Quickly, they created the following: One group studied World War II and built a device that could detect land mines; another group solved the problem of birds eating vegetables in the garden by building a simple robot that vibrated when birds came near. A third group took up the issue that lightning killed five people on a beach, so they built a device that could detect imminent lightning and then sound an alarm.
One 10-year-old observed, “I am supposed to help humanity, so I decided to start in my own neighborhood.”
As another example, a school in Australia built its learning around what they called “enigma missions,” which are complex problems or issues to be solved. One group studied autism because they knew relatives who were autistic; another took up the issue of homelessness, and still another tackled DNA, which one boy observed is an enigma in itself. The students were incredibly engaged and came up with great insights. One pupil who examined homelessness and drew some important conclusions said, “I feel so complete,” not in the sense of being finished, but having brought something valuable to fruition.
We have vastly underestimated what students can do and what they value. We now say that one of the core learning goals for students is to help humanity. Children naturally take to this not because they are altruistic, but because they see this as a basic human motivator — they want to do it for their own good as well as for others. They learn a strong set of values and skills that will serve them for life. Teachers play a new role: helping students focus, giving them scope to engage with each other, examining learning designs, assessing results and deriving lessons for improving learning.
We are in the first phase, and it is very clear that the ‘seam’ is being opened and has the potential to be very rich indeed.
We have a feeling that from here on, these developments will move very fast for the very simple reason that it unleashes the individual and collective spirit for deep learning that gives all learners a role in helping humanity, thereby helping themselves. We will have more to report soon.
*Thanks to fellow NPDL directors Joanne Quinn and Joanne McEachen and all of our school partners.
Michael Fullan is Professor Emeritus, OISE/University of Toronto and Global Director Leadership, NPDL. The report “A Rich Seam: How New Pedagogies Find Deep Learning” was published as a part of Open Ideas at Pearson.
This Exciting Program Moves Struggling Students to the Head of the Class
The statistics are troubling. Only about 16 percent of students in Harlem pass the New York State English Language Arts exam. And just 31 percent of children across New York City pass it. But one group is changing that.
The Reading Team, a Harlem-based literacy organization, is working to make children who are at high risk of reading failure active and excited learners. And it’s finding success: In 2015, 80 percent of Reading Team children passed the New York State English Language Arts exam.
How are they doing it? By making literacy relevant to every activity. Watch the video above to see how the organization uses computer coding, chess, and more to support the children’s success in school and in life.
Removing Children from Abusive Situations at Home Isn’t Always the Answer. This Is
Elisa Izquierdo was conceived in a Brooklyn, N.Y., homeless shelter and born with cocaine in her bloodstream in late 1980s. Her mother, Awilda Lopez, went on week-long drug binges and cashed welfare checks to feed her crack addiction. Two of Lopez’s other children lived with relatives, removed from the home by the court system.
Social workers placed Izquierdo in the custody of her father, where she remained until his death in 1994. After returning to live with her mother, school officials noticed that Izquierdo was withdrawn, walked as if recovering from an injury and had a large bruise marking her head, prompting them to call child welfare. Lopez responded by pulling her daughter out of the school. “When I asked her if she was hitting Elisa,” Izquierdo’s aunt recalls of a conversation with her sister, “she told me no, that she just punished her.”
In November 1995, three days before Thanksgiving, Lopez beat her daughter to death by throwing her against their housing project’s concrete wall, the impact causing the six-year-old’s brain to hemorrhage. After seeing the body, one police lieutenant told reporters that it was the worst case of child abuse he had seen in his 22 years on the force. Authorities had been notified of Izquierdo’s case at least eight times, but failed to respond despite plangent cries for help ringing out repeatedly.
The shocking murder, for which then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the entire city was “accountable,” led to the creation of the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), a governmental body with a $2.9 billion budget charged to protect the well-being of New York City’s children. During its overzealous beginnings, the agency took things too far. In 1993, more than 45,000 kids resided in foster care. This year, in an equally stunning turn, those in the system numbered just 10,400, less than a quarter of its prior size. But with a spate of deaths in 2014, is the reduction in foster care population endangering children?
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At the time of Izquierdo’s murder, budget cuts placed heavy caseloads — allegedly as high as 25 families per employee in Queens — on child protection workers, who had little access to data collected by other city agencies. The entire child welfare system was based on “paper case files and folders,” some stacked five feet high along the office walls, says Andrew White, ACS’s deputy commissioner for policy, planning and measurement. A month after Izquierdo’s death, Mayor Giuliani contemplated an additional $18 million cut, largely from the team of field investigators. By the time the budget was drafted, however, he decided to take more decisive action by creating ACS to manage child welfare cases.
By setting up ACS to operate outside the larger social service bureaucracy and appointing a former federal prosecutor to head the agency, Giuliani set a presumption of action. “The philosophy of child welfare has been too rigidly focused on holding families together, sometimes at the cost of protecting babies and children,” Giuliani said in his 1996 address to the city council, according to The New York Times. “When a child is abused, when child safety is in question, then government must act.” Almost overnight, ineffective investigations were replaced by punitive interventions.
But soon, mismanagement crept back in: One contractor faked records, while another misspent thousands of dollars at Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration vetted long-standing partnerships with group homes and residential rehab facilities, ending those that weren’t up to snuff. ACS’s professional staff began integrating a more rigorous understanding of mental health, domestic violence and substance abuse into their work, a move that would culminate in the next administration’s integration of research on trauma.
“Foster care is expensive, not only in financial terms but in human psychological development.”
—Andrew White
In the last year and a half under Bill de Blasio’s mayorship, ACS pioneered new tactics to keep families united, shifting its emphasis to 11 evidence-based preventative services, which officials believe is the largest and most diverse continuum of child-centered programs anywhere in the world. Serving 19,962 families last year, the agency now asks, why take a child away from a bad parent if the city could help that parent do a better job of parenting in the first place?
“Since the late Nineties, there’s been a recognition that foster care is not a panacea. Foster care is very valuable in certain situations and very necessary in certain situations,” explains White, before adding that it’s also a traumatic experience for children that often doesn’t lead to positive results.
A growing body of work by sociologists and neuroscientists points to the negative effects of distressing, adverse experiences in childhood as the root for many developmental problems. Parents who were physically abused or neglected as kids are more likely to treat the next generation in a similar fashion, according to Cathy Spatz Widom, psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. That logic drove Giuliani to aggressively remove kids from dangerous upbringings, but advocates wondered if being separated from parents traumatized foster children?
By examining foster care records, Spatz Widom found little difference in arrest rates during adulthood between kids abused or neglected at home and those placed in foster care or with a guardian — proving that the instability of being removed from the home does not cause a child future harm. That being said, Spatz Widom did discover that children who were moved three times or more developed significant behavior problems — “chronic fighting, fire setting, destructiveness, uncontrollable anger, sadistic tendencies, and extreme defiance of authority” — and, in adulthood, had arrest rates that were nearly twice as high. Stability, she concluded, was hugely important for a child’s development.
“Foster care is expensive, not only in financial terms but in human psychological development. The breakup of a family causes all kinds of trauma, and sometimes that’s necessary. But a lot of times — and we know from looking at cases now — many of the parents we work with today went into foster care during the crack years,” White says. “It’s devastating to see they don’t have stability in their lives, and they don’t have the parenting skills. You can see the history in what’s happening now. We don’t want to repeat that. We want to ensure families get what they need now.”
“When a child is abused, when child safety is in question, then government must act.”
—Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
During an intervention today, ACS first tries to repair a family with intensive therapy and developmental workshops. If that fails, it looks to non-custodial parents or other family members to act as caretakers, keeping the family as intact as possible. “This is not a cookie-cutter approach. It’s individualized service to address their unique concerns,” White says.
Many of ACS’s 11 models were adapted from other realms of social work, particularly criminal justice, and cover every imaginable scenario. Brief Strategic Family Therapy, for example, is targeted at reasserting parental leadership when minors develop drug addictions and other behavior problems. Child-Parent Psychotherapy, meanwhile, helps mothers strengthen attachments with children under five who experienced a traumatic event, ensuring the youngster feels a sense of safety. There’s also various levels of monitoring. Family Treatment and Rehabilitation, which is on the high-risk end, helps participants achieve a baseline of sobriety (for instance) with three visits a week, while a low- to moderate-risk family struggling with poverty may partake in Family Connections, where plans are reevaluated every 90 days. A team of six improves program development, and other staff continuously monitor contractors to ensure correct procedures are followed.
Many are still critical of ACS, particularly when it comes to the length of time children stay in foster care — a median of 53 months in 2014 — waiting to be adopted. The city’s public advocate, Letitia James, filed a class action lawsuit in July on behalf of 10 foster children, which pointed out that New York City’s wait times are twice as long as the rest of the country and that children suffer higher rates of maltreatment while in foster care. In a press release, James claims that, “ACS has delegated foster care to 29 contract agencies, but has consistently failed to monitor these contract agencies — leaving thousands of children languishing in the system with no permanent home.” ACS attributes much of the adoption delay to bureaucratic systems outside their control and says their new programs are making headway. A settlement with Gov. Andrew Cuomo was reached in October, and a state-appointed monitor was assigned to ensure the city takes corrective action; ACS is still contesting the legal challenge in court.
Despite the suit, White looks at ACS’s progress today and believes that “we are far and away the leader in the country doing this work on the preventive side,” he says. “A small foster care system is a reflection of a healthy city. We have a city now that is more stable for families than back in the Nineties.”
The hope is that today, child protective workers would visit an Elisa Izquierdo earlier and regularly. They could provide treatment for her mother’s drug addiction and diagnose any mental illness. The innocent girl could be placed with another family member and would have the opportunity to grow up. Because of Izquierdo’s death, a system changed. Now it is ACS’s responsibility to ensure that she didn’t die in vain.
Homepage photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images
One Small Town in Maine Is Trying Something Radical to Keep Its Population From Decreasing
The problem facing some Maine towns: declining enrollments and budget crunches in public schools.
As a result, some local schools have been forced to close, and the community must send their kids elsewhere for their education. The town of St. Francis, for example, was about to lose its local elementary school because only 32 kids were enrolled. Closing the facility would save the district $170,000, but result in hour-long bus trips to Fort Kent, 16 miles away.
But the residents have come up with an innovative idea that could save their elementary school: give the building to the town. Part of the structure would continue to serve as classroom space for pre-kindergarten through fifth grade students, and the other part would be converted into much-needed housing for town seniors, whose rent would contribute to running the school.
Although there is much to be worked out before the plan can go ahead, both sides involved agree that it’s a good idea. The school district superintendent Tim Doak tells the Bangor Daily News, “The more we talked about it, the more it looked like a win-win for everyone. It would help keep elderly residents in the community, it keeps the kids at school and it could provide jobs.”
Local representative John Martin has introduced legislation to allow this transfer to happen. At a recent school board meeting, he said, “There is currently nothing in the law that gives [St. Francis] the ability to do what they want to do: generate income from elderly housing [and] put them in the position to apply for grants.”
Doak is hopeful that this solution could help other struggling small-town schools in Maine. “I do think this idea for St. Francis can work,” he says. “We just need to move carefully, [and] this could be a model for the rest of the state.”
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How Paper Airplanes Paid for a Veteran’s Trip to Washington, D.C.
While learning about D-Day in his homeschool lessons, Jagger, a 7-year-old from Hamilton, Ind., was struck by the soldiers’ bravery. Inspired, Jagger wanted to do something to honor a World War II veteran.
So he came up with the idea of raising $800 — enough to send one veteran on a trip to Washington, D.C. through Northeast Indiana Honor Flight, a nonprofit that has four flights scheduled for 2015 to bring groups of veterans to see the World War II memorial.
“He loves folding paper airplanes and with it being the honor flight we thought that would be a really neat thing that he could give back to the people who are helping him reach his goal,” Jagger’s mother Chante Hurraw tells WANE-TV.
So Jagger began folding airplanes and built a display explaining his project. He took it and his paper-airplane-folding prowess to several dinners at American Legions and told the attendees that if they made a donation, he’d give them an airplane.
Jagger ended up raising $1,058.25, enough to send one veteran to our nation’s capital, plus extra to start saving up for a second veteran’s trip. Jagger plans to keep up his fundraising and paper airplane mission indefinitely.
“We couldn’t be prouder,” his mom says. “He’s a great person. He’s a great kid, but he is a great person. He has a big heart. That’s important to us.”
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This Second Grader Saved for a Pet Snake, But Decided to Feed the Poor Instead
Eight-year-old Keaton Snell of Winter Haven, Fla., assiduously saved his allowance and birthday money for months, trying to accumulate enough to buy himself a snake. Once he’d saved $114, he approached his mom about getting the pet, but she said he needed to wait until he was 10-years-old.
Keaton wanted to spend the money this year, however, so he decided to buy food for those less fortunate.
He got the idea from his second grade class, which has been talking about ways the kids can help the community and holding a food drive. His teacher, Lori Davis, tells the News Chief, “We’ve been having conversations about the less fortunate, and Keaton is particularly sympathetic about it. He came to me and said, ‘I want to spend $114 on food for the poor,’ and I thought that’s a lot of money, but it was totally his idea and it shows how deep in his heart he feels about this.”
Keaton started by raiding his pantry to give to others. His mom, Shannon Snell, says “I kept telling him he can’t give all of our food away. We need some, too. So it came to the point where he was like, ‘Mom, just take me to the grocery store, and I’ll buy the food.”
Shannon made a deal with her son that she would match his contributions. Keaton ended up donating 72 cans, which will stock the food pantry at The Mission, a Winter Haven, Fla., church organization that feeds the hungry and helps the homeless.
Keaton’s classmates were donating an average of about two cans per person, but when they saw all the cans he brought, it inspired them to give more.
Davis says, “He came into school with two bags overflowing with cans. The other kids saw it, we talked about Keaton using his own money and they all got really excited about it. They started bringing in more cans and we saw the school count rise a lot.”
So far, the school has collected 3,000 cans of food. As for Keaton, he may not yet have a pet snake, but his teacher rewarded him with one week during which he doesn’t have to wear his school uniform. “He went above and beyond,” Davis says.
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How Does a Professional Skier Inspire Kids Toward Academic Achievement?
If you live in Colorado, you know to expect the release of a movie highlighting the daring exploits of professional skiers in far-flung, snowy mountains from Warren Miller Entertainment each year.
Chris Anthony has been a featured athlete in the films for 25 years, but one of his lesser-known achievements is the inspiration he’s been bringing to young people for 15 years through his Chris Anthony Youth Initiative Project.
The 48-year-old Anthony visits schools across the country and shows clips from the films as a way to teach kids life lessons that he hopes will spur them to achieve academically and athletically. He tells Jason Blevins of the Denver Post, “I want to reach as many kids as possible. I want to let kids know there are many paths to success and they can use whatever talents they have to reach their goals. The idea is to inspire and motivate kids to go out and find their niche.”
Anthony’s presentations emphasize different ways of thinking about academic subjects that might reach kids who don’t connect with traditional methods. For example, he often shows a video of Olympic gold medalist Mikaela Shriffin slaloming to teach lessons in physics and geometry. And he teaches history through the film “Climb To Glory,” about the 10th Mountain Division Ski Troopers in World War II.
He also focuses on teaching outdoor safety to kids in mountain schools. “We should be educating our kids in the mountains about both the opportunities and dangers in the backcountry. We have an opportunity here to create more awareness,” he tells the Denver Post.
Anthony recently started a foundation which raises money to fund even more school visits, as well as a scholarship program. Several other professional skiers have joined his mission, realizing that they have skills to showcase off the mountain too. “This becomes a channel for them to give back,” Anthony says.
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