It was a dark weekend back in August 2013, with a lot of die-hard EDM (electronic dance music, to the uninitiated) fans extremely bummed out about one for their favorite summer events getting canned a day early. The reason? MDMA, aka “molly” or ecstasy, had claimed two lives at NYC’s Electric Zoo.
The same month, another died at the House of Blues in Boston. This year, there has been two more deaths due to the designer drug in Las Vegas and Los Angeles and, according to BuzzFeed, an astonishing 50 people required medical attention at Boston’s TD Garden in June after getting sick from drug use.
So it’s no surprise that this year’s Electric Zoo attendees arrived to find drug dogs patrolling and sniffing at the festival’s entrance, augmenting the familiar pat-down and search process. “It’s very difficult as a producer of large-scale events to control the decisions that people are making prior to even entering the show,” Jennifer Forkish, Vice President of Communications for Insomniac Events, which runs Electric Daisy Carnival, tells The Fader. “If we could stop everyone from making poor choices, we would. But we can’t.”
Lack of law enforcement at Electric Zoo has never been the problem. Even then-mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2013 said the Electric Zoo had “as good procedures as we could think of.” And there were no shortages of arrests at the other shows that drew headlines: at the Las Vegas event 29 people were arrested and at the two-day L.A. festival, more than 150 people were.
So festival promoters are looking for other ways to stem the idea of drug abuse at their events.
Dr. Andrew Bazos, Chairman of the SFX Medical and Safety Committee, is pushing to enhance two non-security related measures that have worked in Europe: harm-reduction and medical. Both the Electric Zoo and Electric Daisy Carnival are on board, handing out water, providing cool-down areas and hiring medical workers to provide discreet aid to anyone that needs it. They’re also investing in making sure everybody is 18 or older, as many of the victims of late have been minors.
As Robbie Kowal of SunsetSF promotions puts it, “There’s no security measure you can take when a kid who’s ignorant does something he shouldn’t before he walks in. So we have to educate them how to do these things safely.”
Category: Bridging the Opportunity Divide
This City’s Homeless Are Building Their Own Houses
The tiny home trend has been on the rise for those who want to live more modestly or sustainably, and now the movement is especially gaining traction for a very different group of people: the homeless.
That’s the aim for Tiny Houses Greensboro, Interactive Resource Center and other volunteer organizations in Greensboro, N.C., who are currently raising funds to build a 128 square-foot prototype home that includes a bedroom, a fully functioning bathroom and a kitchen in order to end homelessness in the area.
According to their IndieGogo campaign, once the first home is successfully constructed, the team plans to eventually build an entire tiny home village for 879 homeless residents that are currently living in tent communities and homeless shelters.
Most notably, these small spaces won’t just be built by the volunteers, but also by the people who will be living in them one day. The Huffington Post notes, the organizers held a “How to Build a Tiny House” workshop to teach homeless residents and community members how to erect framing for the prototype home.
MORE: Small Spaces, Big Ideas: 7 Tiny Homes With the Power to Transform How We Live
“The process of helping to create and build a home of your own provides people experiencing homelessness with greater dignity, self-respect, and the discipline to improve their lives substantially and more holistically,” Tiny Houses Greensboro says on their campaign.
“The person experiencing homelessness has got to put a lot of sweat equity into the house,” a member of the organization tells Fox 29 News. “You know, sometimes it takes a village. Well, there’s also a saying that says, ‘If it takes a village, build one.'”
We previously reported that tiny home projects for the homeless have popped up in Portland, Ore.; Madison, Wis.; Austin, Texas; and Newfield, N.Y.
The idea of “housing first” has been championed by anti-homelessness advocates. The idea is that housing the homeless can cost significantly less than leaving them on the streets. Per the National Alliance to End Homelessness, “homelessness causes illnesses and makes existing mental and physical illnesses worse, leading to expensive treatment and medical services. Permanent supportive housing improves physical and mental health, which reduces the need for these services, particularly expensive inpatient mental health care and hospitalization.”
It’s amazing how a tiny house can mean something so much bigger.
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DON’T MISS: Does It Take a (Tiny) Village to End Homelessness in America?
Meet The Woman Putting a Personal Touch on Health Insurance Enrollment
With all the intricate details of the health care system, it’s easy to get bogged down and overwhelmed, making it next to impossible to choose the best insurance option. Which is why King County, Wash. is taking a different approach — they’re letting the people that know the community take the lead.
So instead of residents hearing about health care options in a general format, a representative of the community presents information catered to the individual area’s needs.
The woman behind the idea? Daphne Pie, King County’s manager of access and outreach at the Public Health Department for Seattle and King County. Her group of workers consists of 24 community leaders, including representatives from Cierra Sisters, Arms Perinatal Doula Program, Gay City health project and the Asian Counseling and Referral Service.
All of this began about four years when the County Council put forth their ‘equity and social justice’ strategic plan, according to National Journal. The measure has each county department focus on reaching the communities where there is the greatest inequity in their respective area of expertise.
For Pie, that meant finding a way to reach diverse groups about their health insurance choices. Her solution? For every community that had above average rates of uninsured citizens, a leader that spreads the message: “you can have health care insurance for free or at a very low cost.”
Communities in King County are quite diverse, featuring African-Americans, Native American tribes, Latinas and homosexuals, among others. Therefore, it’s useful to have a member of that community who can understand and address each group’s specific needs — whether it be HIV medication or natural childbirth.
The County’s commitment to this project isn’t just on paper, either. In 2013, out of the $1.6 million of federal grants King County received, $1.3 million of it went to community partners.
“You have to reach the uninsured where they live,” Pie tells National Journal. “We can’t expect these people to always come to us.”
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When This School Got Rid of Homework, It Saw a Dramatic Outcome
In 2010, when Principal Greg Green decided to “flip” one class in his failing high school, it was considered a radical idea.
Flipping a classroom essentially turns the typical school day on its head. Students receive video lessons online at home and do their homework during class, freeing up time so they can receive more one-on-one help from their teacher.
While other schools had adopted the flipped model with some success, Green was cautious. He wanted to see the results for himself. So he ran a 20-week-long trial at Clintondale High School in Clinton, Mich., which at the time, ranked in the lowest 5 percent of Michigan’s high schools. The test run applied the flipped classroom teaching model to a civics class that included 13 failing kids and compared it with another class using a traditional teaching method.
Green says that the results were staggering. “The at-risk class actually outperformed the traditional class using the same teacher, the same materials — just a little different method.”
The next year, Green flipped every class at Clintondale, making it the first school in the nation to do so. Since then, the school has seen an increase in attendance, college acceptance and a fairly significant reduction in failure rates — from 35 percent to 10 percent in just two years.
How Baltimore’s Ex-Cons Are Stopping Violence Before It Happens
Baltimore is one of the country’s most notorious gang-infested cities.
As HBO’s “The Wire” depicted, the city has long grappled with the issue. In fact, Baltimore City is estimated to be home to 170 gangs with more than 1,000 members, according to a recent report.
Much like a virus, stopping the spread of violence can be difficult. But Cure Violence, a nonprofit that operates six inner city initiatives across the United States, is hoping by treating it like a disease, we can stop it in its tracks.
Founded in 1995 by epidemiologist Gary Slutkin, Cure Violence applies the tenets of disease eradication to gang violence, with the aim of stopping shootings and homicide by targeting the source. The idea is to treat shootings and gang violence much like HIV or tuberculosis and prevent further spreading by starting with those who are already infected. Part of that process is employing community members and even ex-cons, who are product of the neighborhood in which Cure Violence operates.
In Baltimore, Park Heights Safe Streets is Cure Violence’s local arm of intervention. These residents are “trusted insiders” who know boundary lines and corners, walking the streets to help prevent shootings from happening. But they’re not police; they’ll even look away when it comes to drug deals, as long as they don’t involve violence.
“You twist it. You say, ‘You going to shoot that guy because he stole $130 of drugs? Christmas is around the corner. Who’s going to be Santa?’ ” says Dante Barksdale, the outreach coordinator for the Park Heights site.
Barksdale is a former convict and the nephew of the notorious Nathan “Bodie” Barksdale, the inspiration for Avon Barksdale, a character in “The Wire.” Barksdale’s colleague, Greg Marshburn, has been in and out of prison over 17 years for crimes such as attempted murder and robbery. He has been stabbed at least 20 times and shot four times. He uses his former contacts to seek out where shootings or homicides are imminent.
“I go as far as saying, ‘Who’s going to raise your kids?’ ” Marshburn says of when he intervenes.
Communities are required to be in the top quartile of nonfatal shootings and gun homicides in order to become a Safe Streets neighborhood. The group also vets its community employees by health professionals and local leaders who determine if the individual is able to handle conflict resolution and can stay clean. The only immediate disqualification for a job is a history of child abuse or domestic violence, the National Journal reports.
While Safe Streets can’t completely eradicate violence, it’s certainly making inroads at slowing the infection. The program has mediated 685 conflicts this year, with 624 anticipated to have resulted in a shooting.
Now that’s a statistic that doesn’t need juking.
MORE: The Big Easy Has a Bright Idea to Curb Violence
Can Girls Dance Their Way Toward Computer Programming Careers?
Lately, educators have stressed the importance of attracting more girls to STEM areas of study (science, technology, engineering and math) — especially computer programming, since men outnumber women 7 to 3 in tech industry careers. But now, a group of researchers at South Carolina’s Clemson University have hit upon a unique way to spark girls’ interest in software engineering: through dance.
Dr. Shaundra Daily, an assistant professor of computing at Clemson who was the lead author in a study published in Technology, Knowledge and Learning, found that the computational skills of fifth and sixth grade girls improved after they interacted with dance choreography software. Daily hit upon this idea because she was a competitive dancer who now leads her own computer lab at Clemson.
Through the Virtual Environment Interactions (VEnvl) software, the girls were able to program three-dimensional characters to perform dance moves just by moving their own bodies. The girls learned to develop new computing strategies to improve their choreography.
Dr. Alison Leonard, an assistant professor of education at Clemson who co-authored the study, says in a press release that dance and software engineering have more in common than you might think: “Executing one bit of code or movement one after the other exists in both programming and choreography. Likewise, loops or repeating a set of steps, also occur in both contexts.”
One of the goals of Daily’s research is to determine how to encourage more girls to become involved with computing. “We want more diverse faces around the table, helping to come up with technological solutions to societal issues,” she says. “So we’re working with girls to create more pathways to support their participation.”
MORE: What Has Two Pom-Poms, a Ph.D. and a Passion for Science?
When Traditional Disciplinary Actions Don’t Work, Restorative Justice Can Bring About the Healing Process
Professor Carolyn Boyes-Watson remembers getting a call from distressed administrators at a Boston high school: “We have so many girls fighting,” they said, “we’re picking up clumps of hair in the hallways.”
Students were yanking each other’s hair out while brawling in the school’s corridors and cafeteria, and administrators couldn’t figure out how to make the violence stop.
So they called in Boyes-Watson, a sociology professor at Suffolk University in Boston, to train students and teachers in a conflict-resolution practice known as restorative justice. Drawing from Native American traditions, the concept uses ritualized dialogue to try to mend broken communities. Participants gather in circles to try to resolve problems through discussion, rather than retribution.
Across the country, more and more schools are turning to restorative justice as they realize that traditional disciplinary measures — suspensions and expulsions — often don’t deter misbehavior, but can instead set troubled students up for failure by further disengaging them from school.
While traditional justice systems are based on punishing perpetrators (usually by ostracizing or isolating them), restorative justice focuses on healing the harm that has been inflicted — personally and community-wide. Restorative justice programs in schools seek to establish cultures of openness, communication and respect.
Boyes-Watson helped the Boston school set up a practice in which groups of students and teachers met regularly to discuss problems while sitting in a circle. “The kids absolutely take to the circle immediately,” Boyes-Watson says. “They treat each other better. They’re kinder to one another. They feel a sense of belonging and connection. It’s really quite simple. … It’s a small intervention that makes such a powerful difference.”
The effect was transformative. By the following year, the school had solved the problem of girls fighting — no more brawls in the halls.
With similar results being reproduced in other schools, restorative justice is catching on nationwide: Schools in California, New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota are using the practice. Even the federal government is getting on board.
Earlier this year, the Obama administration released new school discipline guidelines asking administrators to move away from zero-tolerance discipline and begin using alternative measures like restorative justice. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan noted that suspensions often lead to additional disciplinary action, repeating grades, dropping out and ending up in the juvenile justice system. Restorative justice seeks to change that trajectory, known as the school-to-prison pipeline.
DIVERTING THE PIPELINE
The growth of restorative justice in schools comes in response to the failure of zero-tolerance discipline, which uses removal from school as a punishment. During the 1990s, suspensions and expulsions became increasingly popular, paralleling a dramatic increase in the country’s prison population as a result of the War on Drugs.
Initially, zero-tolerance discipline was focused on the most extreme offenses: guns and drugs in school. “But what happened over the years was that morphed into including more and more things into what were zero-tolerance offenses,“ says Dr. Martha Schiff, a restorative justice expert at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Fla., including bringing nail clippers or butter knives to school.
Not surprisingly, the number of suspensions and expulsions has nearly doubled since 1974.
Disproportionately, students of color have been the recipients of those punishments. Nationwide, while 17 percent of school-age children are black, African-American students comprise 37 percent of suspensions and 35 percent of expulsions. Additionally, black students are suspended or expelled at a rate three times that of white students.
“Kids who should have been in school were being systematically kicked out and winding up in the justice system,” says Schiff. A name for this dynamic emerged — the school-to-prison pipeline — highlighting the parallel failures of school discipline and the justice system, in which African-Americans are disproportionately incarcerated.
Now, as restorative justice takes root in schools, studies are showing that it does reduce suspensions and expulsions — often quite dramatically. Whether the practice addresses the racial disparities in school discipline is a question that requires further study, says Schiff.
Not everyone is sold on restorative justice. Annalise Acorn, a law professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, has written a book-length critique, arguing that the practice can traumatize victims and allow unrepentant offenders to fake their way out of trouble. And Dr. Hilary Cremin, a senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge in England, warns that restorative justice is not a panacea and must be implemented carefully in order to avoid causing more harm than good.
At the moment, however, critical voices are in the minority. “I’ve never seen the momentum and groundswell around it quite like it is now,” says Schiff.
MAKING IT RIGHT
In Oakland, Calif., the entire school district has adopted restorative justice practices, after seeing dramatic results at a single troubled middle school.
In 2005, Cole Middle School was in crisis. Student behavior at the school — located in West Oakland, a low-income, high-crime neighborhood — was out of control despite aggressive disciplinary tactics. The school had a suspension rate nearly five times higher than the district average and was expelling four times as many students.
Fania Davis, head of the organization Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, helped the school implement restorative justice circles. In a single year, suspensions dropped by 87 percent and not a single student was expelled.
“In our first pilot, we were able to completely eliminate violence,” says Davis. Principals took notice, and by 2011 the Oakland Unified School District had hired a district-wide program manager to help administrators and teachers bring restorative justice into their schools.
According to David Yusem, Restorative Justice’s program manager, schools first establish dialogue circles as a regular practice in classrooms. Students sit with their teachers and establish group values, creating a space to connect and speak personally about events in school or in their lives. Circle members talk one at a time — without interruption — passing a “talking piece,” an object indicating whose turn it is to speak.
On their own, dialogue circles have a dramatic impact, says Ina Bendich, of the Restorative Justice Training Institute in Berkeley, Calif. “Eighty-five percent of your problems will be taken care of when you really focus on community building,” she says.
For the other 15 percent of problems, schools use response-to-harm circles, designed to address the aftermath of specific conflicts, like two students fighting, or a student yelling at a teacher. With these, the affected parties talk about what happened and what they were feeling at the time.
“It gives the person who did the harm a chance to make it right, rather than pushing them out of school,” explains Yusem.
Taking responsibility for one’s actions can include things like public apologies or community service, or a modified form of a traditional punishment, such as in-school suspension instead of removal.
Kris Miner, executive director of St. Croix Valley Restorative Justice in River Falls, Wis., says she helped facilitate a healing circle that included parents, students and school staff after a white 11th-grader used the N-word and nearly got into a fistfight with a black student.
As the talking piece went around the circle, one father, a corrections officer, spoke about how damaging racial slurs can be and how, in prison, they can get you killed. A Latina guidance counselor talked about being called a “wetback” and a “spic.”
The circle created an opportunity for reconciliation for all parties involved — a moment that never would have occurred if the offending student had simply been removed from school.
The student who had used the racial slur became more and more emotional as people spoke. “I am so sorry that I said that,” he said, tearing up. “I will never say that word again.”
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The Bay City’s Latest Plan to Combat Homelessness
San Francisco is a city of paradoxes. Walking around, you can see evidence of the booming tech scene and expensively-clad citizens, yet it also has a chronic homelessness problem. But the City by the Bay finally thinks it may have a solution by combining the needs of both the homeless and corporations: tax breaks for community projects.
With 6,436 homeless people and 3,401 living on its streets, according to the Human Services Agency, San Francisco has to be inventive. And that’s where this new initiative comes in. As more and more tech companies, (like Twitter) move to the area, San Francisco is hoping that its new “community benefit agreement” will encourage these businesses to stay and improve the city.
Through the initiative, tech companies will receive multi-million dollar tax breaks if they set up residence in a troubled neighborhood and invest a portion of those tax breaks into improving it.
While some remain skeptical about the amount of money that a company will actually put towards a neighborhood, this program offers unique possibilities for great change. For instance, many tech companies will set up micro-apartment communities for their employees; if created for homeless people, there’s the potential to drastically reduce the problem.
Salt Lake City is a model for this type of project. Ten years ago, the Utah city started a program to combat homelessness through these micro-apartments communities. Apartments were set up outside of troubled neighborhoods, and residents were quickly placed into them, removing them from the negative influences.
In each housing complex, on-site counseling was available. These counselors helped residents beat drug addictions, find jobs and diagnose and treat mental diseases. The result? Salt Lake City now only has about 400 homeless persons.
Although there are differences in cost of living and other factors between Salt Lake City and San Francisco, there is possibility for replication and improvement.
For Matt Minkevitch, who runs Road Home, the main nonprofit homeless agency in Utah, these houses serve as a stepping stone.
“The idea is, we don’t want people to just live in this shelter,” Minkevitch tells San Francisco Gate. “We want to make it as comfortable as possible, but we want them to move on to housing — on to better lives.”
DON’T MISS: Ever Wondered What To Say To A Homeless Person? Here Are 5 Things to Say And 5 Things Not to Say
What Happens When a Teacher Walks in Her Students’ Shoes?
What is it like to be a high school student today?
In a viral blog post, Alexis Wiggins, a 15-year teaching veteran, describes what she learned after she shadowed a sophomore one day and a senior for another. She said her experience was “so eye-opening” that she wishes she could go back to every class she’s ever taught and “change a minimum of 10 things.”
Her story, titled “A veteran teacher turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days – a sobering lesson learned,” was originally posted by Alexis’s own father, Grant Wiggins, a former teacher himself and the current president of Authentic Education. It has been read more than 760,000 times.
Here are three key things she learned:
1. “Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting.”
Besides walking from class to class, Wiggins sat the entire day and found herself completely drained from so much sitting. She writes, “I was so tired by the end of the day, I wasn’t absorbing most of the content, so I am not sure my previous method of making kids sit through hour-long, sit-down discussions of the texts was all that effective.”
What she would do now:
1. Require a mandatory stretch halfway through the class.
2. Put a Nerf basketball hoop on the back of her door and encourage kids to play in the first and final minutes of class.
3. Build in a hands-on, move-around activity into every single class day.
2. “High school students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90 percent of their classes.”
Wiggins found that students weren’t offered a chance to speak up in class — most of the time they were just taking notes while the teacher droned on and on. “It made me realize how little autonomy students have, how little of their learning they are directing or choosing. I felt especially bad about opportunities I had missed in the past in this regard.”
What she would do now:
1. Offer smaller lessons with engaging activities that keep students on their feet.
2. Set a timer to not go overboard with the lecturing. “When the timer goes off, I am done. End of story.”
3. Start every class with at least 15 to 20 minutes of questions students might have about the previous lesson. “This is my biggest regret right now – not starting every class this way,” she writes. “I am imagining all the misunderstandings, the engagement, the enthusiasm, the collaborative skills, and the autonomy we missed out on because I didn’t begin every class with 15 or 20 minutes of this.”
3: “You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long.”
Wiggins realized how a teacher’s actions may deter a student from speaking up or asking questions: “[If the person teaching me] answered those questions by rolling their eyes at me, I would never want to ask another question again.”
What she would do now:
1. Show more “patience and love” when dealing with students who have questions. “Questions are an invitation to know a student better and create a bond with that student,” she said.
2. Stop the eye-rolling or the snarky, sarcastic remarks to students.
3. Create a specific time period for students to ask all their questions.
After her experiment, Wiggins concludes, “I worry about the messages we send them as they go to our classes and home to do our assigned work, and my hope is that more teachers who are able will try this shadowing and share their findings with each other and their administrations.”
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This App Hopes to Reduce Mass Shootings By Addressing Mental Illness
In the wake of tragedy, particularly the string of mass shootings across the country as of late, we often seek out answers as to why it happened.
More recently, the national conversation has focused on recognizing mental illness. While there is not a direct correlation between mass shootings and mental illness, educating the public on the subject is one step Americans are beginning to take to prevent tragedy from striking again.
The Center of Health Care Services is joining the movement with the release of Mental Health & You (MHU), a mobile app and crisis intervention tool providing resources on mental illness, according to Emergency Management.
“We know that one in four people will be diagnosed with a mental illness in this country, but most go untreated,” says Leon Evans, executive director of the center. “We know that people with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violent crime, rather than perpetrators of it.”
The app provides information on signs and symptoms of mental disorders including anxiety, depression, attention-deficit disorder, post-traumatic-stress-syndrome (PTSD) and schizophrenia. Users can also find direct links to local and national advocacy groups like the National Alliance for Mental Illness and the San Antonio Coalition for Veterans and Families, according to Allison Greer, vice president of external relations for the center.
More interestingly, Mental Health & You also includes a section devoted to debunking myths and “stigma-busters,” correcting misinformation that often is associated with the subject. It also mentions famous people who grapple with mental illness including Abraham Lincoln and actress Catherine Zeta Jones. To further dispel the taboo of mental illness, the app lists movies that illustrate the issue such as “Silver Linings Playbook.”
But most importantly, the app is a tool for individuals who may be concerned about a friend or loved one and for law enforcement looking for crisis training on how to respond to a situation with a person struggling with mental illness.
“For example, they know not to use their ‘command voice,’” Greer says.
The app features a “get help now” button that immediately connects a user with a local hotline, where trained staff available to provide advice or call in a mobile crisis intervention outreach team to help the situation. The app also has a button that can connect users with 911 as well.
MORE: After Newtown Shooting, This Critical Program Helps Police Deal with Mental Health Emergencies