Tag: Calls to Action

A Push to Make the Life-Saving Antidote to Overdose Available to All

Posted on by robbie

Through the work of his nonprofit organization, the Chicago Recovery Alliance, Dan Bigg has helped save thousands of lives from drug overdose. Bigg, personally, has saved at least six. One night a few years ago, for example, Bigg was doing outreach work with a group of intravenous drug users in their apartment in Chicago when he noticed that a striking young woman in her 30s had become ashen. Her breathing had slowed dangerously. Her friends said that she had taken heroin. Brushing aside their objections that he would tear her designer clothes — the woman “looked like a fashion model,” according to Bigg — or bring her down too hard from her high, he injected her with an overdose antidote called naloxone and instantly restored her breathing to normal.
A few weeks later, she called him to say thank you: If you hadn’t been there, she told him, my friends might not have realized I was so close to death.
It is a scenario that has grown increasingly common in the United States: accidental overdose from opioids like heroin and, more commonly, prescription painkillers including oxycodone and Vicodin. There are now more deaths from drug overdose — roughly 100 Americans every day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — than from car crashes or homicides. And in at least half of the overdose cases, people die in the presence of friends or bystanders who could have done something to save them.
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Dan-BiggDan Bigg
Without Bigg, that number would be much, much higher. Since the mid-1990s, the 55-year-old co-founder of the Chicago Recovery Alliance (CRA) has been handing out naloxone, the antidote, to drug users and to their loved ones, who would be in a position to help them in case of an overdose. The life-saving drug, which goes by the brand name Narcan, was previously used only in hospitals and emergency departments (today, many first responders like emergency medical technicians and some police officers and firefighters also have it at the ready) — and it worked well in these settings, except for the fact that many witnesses to overdose don’t call for help or get victims to the hospital in time.
So Bigg pioneered the strategy to get naloxone into more hands. You don’t have to be a health-care worker to use it safely. Naloxone is nontoxic and non-addictive, and it can quickly — typically within seconds, or sometimes minutes — reverse the potentially deadly effects of opioids. It can be injected or delivered through the nose, though so far, only the injectible formulation has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Naloxone also reverses overdose from combinations of drugs — generally, opioid overdoses involve other depressant substances like alcohol or Valium — as long as one of the drugs is an opioid. It’s safe to use because you can’t get high on it; it works by blocking the effect of opioids on the brain, so it produces the opposite of a high: withdrawal.
There has been an upswell of interest in naloxone since the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead of an overdose on Feb. 2, reportedly with a needle still in his arm and in possession of dozens of bags of heroin. Many in the media have called for making naloxone more widely available, not only for medical workers and first responders, but also for addicted people and their families. It’s an idea that has been around a long time — no one can remember who first came up with it as a way to save overdose victims — but Bigg is credited with being the first to take action on it.
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The second son of a surgeon and a nurse, Bigg started his own public health work as an undergraduate at Claremont McKenna College in California and then at Indiana University. Aiming for a doctorate in psychology, he worked at Chicago’s Lakeshore Hospital in the mid-1980s in one of the first programs in the country to address the connection between injection drug use and the risk of HIV. “I remember reading about what was then called GRID,” says Bigg, referring to the acronym for “gay-related immune deficiency,” which was what health officials called AIDS before the human immunodeficiency virus was discovered and its transmission understood. Soon thereafter, researchers realized that what they thought was a gay disease spread particularly fast among at-risk groups like injection drug users.
Bigg himself isn’t gay and has never suffered from addiction, but many of his close friends did and they were affected by AIDS. So his main goal was to break the connection between addiction and AIDS, and he did it in an unconventional way. Rather than pushing drug users to achieve abstinence, he wanted to try to simply reduce the harms associated with their habit — the risk of HIV being the worst of them at the time. In the early ’90s, Bigg co-founded CRA and began distributing clean needles and information on safer injection practices. And while most other anti-addiction groups were defining recovery as total abstinence, Bigg’s organization described it as “any positive change” that led to better health. By using a more inclusive, less severe approach, Bigg explains, CRA was better able to reach and protect the people at highest risk for AIDS. Soon, his group would become one of the country’s best known “harm reduction” programs.
But in 1996, John Szyler, a recovering heroin addict and co-founder of CRA, relapsed. He overdosed and died shortly thereafter. “We asked, ‘What positive change can we make in John’s memory?’” says Bigg. The idea that had the most resonance was to distribute naloxone and promote its use to others.
It was a choice that prompted a lot less blowback than CRA’s other harm-reduction strategies, such as needle exchange. In recent years, Congress has seesawed on allowing federal dollars to be spent on needle-exchange programs (since 2011, federal funding has been banned), despite decades of evidence showing that they’re safe and effective. Though every public health agency that has examined the data on needle exchange, from the World Health Organization to the CDC, has come down in favor of them, conservative critics of the programs continue to suggest that they enable drug use. Naloxone distribution has been viewed somewhat more positively, however, perhaps because it has the overwhelming public support of so many grieving parents whose children might have been saved by the harmless medication.
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Since CRA started distributing the drug and training people to use it, more than 32,000 people in Chicago alone have participated in his program, with 5,000 successful overdose reversals reported. At least 180 other organizations around the U.S. are now following CRA’s lead, including some state and city health departments. New York State, for example, which has the world’s largest population of injection drug users, now provides naloxone to people leaving drug treatment and to those using needle-exchange programs. Nationwide, to date, 10,000 successful overdose reversals have been reported.
Massachusetts also has a naloxone distribution program, the effectiveness of which researchers studied and reported in January 2013 in the medical journal BMJ. The results? Overdose death rates in localities with the highest access to the drug and the largest number of people trained to use it fell to nearly 50 percent lower than those in regions with limited or no naloxone availability or response training.
Even the federal government has climbed aboard the naloxone bandwagon. In 2012, the Obama administration called for making the antidote more widely available. And last month, shortly after Hoffman’s death, the hardline Office of National Drug Control Policy, the drug czar’s office, which has traditionally viewed addiction as a law-enforcement issue, acknowledged that it is actually a public-health problem — a “disease that can be prevented, treated and from which one can recover.”
“We cannot arrest our way out of the drug problem,” R. Gil Kerlikowske, the current drug czar, told reporters, noting that strategies like wider distribution of naloxone, along with prescription-pill take-back programs and better treatment of addiction, are needed.
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There are still holdouts: Maine’s Republican governor, Paul LePage, the only known remaining anti-naloxone activist, recently rejected laws expanding access to naloxone because he believes it will make drug users feel invincible and, therefore, more likely to take more drugs. But there’s no evidence to support his view. More commonly, a brush with death leads drug users to seek recovery, not to continue their addiction.
Mark Kinzly is a recovering addict and a harm reduction advocate in Massachusetts. Between 1993 and 2004, the 11 years he was drug-free, he saved four people with naloxone. In 2004, he relapsed and had to be revived with the drug himself. “I didn’t feel great, but I sure was grateful,” he said in an interview in The New York Times in 2011. He went back into recovery and then proceeded to revive at least 10 other overdose victims — some of whom, like him, sought help for their drug problems upon their revival.
Of course Bigg supports current efforts to expand naloxone access, but he thinks they aren’t enough. Among the nearly 40,000 people a year who die by overdose, some of those who are at highest risk of death are new drug users, like teenagers who get pills from their parents’ medicine cabinet and whose family members have no idea they are taking drugs. They won’t be saved by making naloxone available only to drug addicts and their families. We would have to put naloxone in almost every home — for example, as part of every first-aid kit.
“I don’t think we will have successfully dealt with this until naloxone is available over the counter at an affordable price,” says Bigg. It’s possible that could happen, if the FDA approves the version of the drug that’s delivered nasally; the National Institute on Drug Abuse is testing it now. But it probably won’t happen quickly without public pressure of the type exerted by AIDS activists in the ’80s and ’90s to push the agency.
Until then, if you want to have naloxone on hand, visit this website to find a local distribution group. And then call the FDA and urge them to make the drug available over the counter. It could save the life of an infant who gets into his older sister’s dental codeine, or a grandfather who takes too much of his prescribed OxyContin, or a teenager who does something stupid with heroin. It could save your life as well.
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Update: Dan Bigg died on August 21, 2018. He is survived by his wife, son, and two daughters.

Look What Happens When Venture Capitalists Get Behind School Reform

Posted on by robbie

Chris Torres credits his high school with setting him on the path to his current job at Google. He’s a graduate of the Denver School of Science and Technology, or DSST, an open-enrollment science-and-math public school on two campuses in Denver. Founded by a former principal, DSST aims to bring quantitative education to more minority and underserved students, who typically don’t go on to careers in these fields.
Torres, 24, graduated in 2008, went on to Stanford University — the first in his family to go to college — and is now a partner operations manager at Google. He cites DSST’s teachers and staff for their help pointing him toward a career in technology, including teaching him to think creatively and guiding him toward a summer program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“The rigorous curriculum, while difficult at the time, had me as prepared as I could’ve been to take on a full engineering course load at university,” says Torres, who now lives in San Francisco.
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If Torres owes some of his success to DSST, the school owes something to NewSchools Venture Fund. When DSST was expanding, it turned to NewSchools, a venture-philanthropy organization based in Oakland, Calif., that funds businesses and nonprofits working with public schools. DSST founder Jacqueline Sullivan met Deborah McGriff, a managing director at NewSchools, when they served on a National Science Foundation committee together.
“We supported their scale-up because of their outstanding early results, particularly related to college readiness and success in STEM,” says Gloria Lee, NewSchools’ president and chief operating officer. The venture fund invested $1.345 million in DSST beginning in 2009. So far, NewSchools says, DSST’s Stapleton campus has a 100 percent college admissions rate for its graduates, with one in three choosing to major in math or science.
Over the last 15 years, NewSchools has invested some $250 million in 150 technology companies, schools and other entities. Founded in 1998 by education entrepreneur Kim Smith and venture capitalists John Doerr and Brook Byers of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, it has a seed fund designed for education startups.
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NewSchools finances charter school networks like KIPP, Match and Uncommon Schools. More recently the group has launched city-based funds to hone in on charter schools, community nonprofits and education-focused businesses in Washington, D.C.; Newark, N.J.; Boston; and Oakland, Calif.
NewSchools also has a Learning to Teach program that helps connect principals and teachers with the latest thinking and research on teacher training, centered around a conference the group runs biannually. Learning to Teach is helping set up teacher-training programs along new lines, mainly outside of graduate schools of education. Their new certification programs use different models, like mirroring medical residencies or using technology to give trainee teachers feedback on their techniques.
“We believe that entrepreneurs can move faster and more dramatically in ways that existing systems can’t,” Lee says.
Although she took her current position three years ago, Lee was involved with NewSchools from its inception. She was a second-year business school student at Stanford when Doerr came to campus to discuss his idea of starting a fund to help entrepreneurs transform education for underserved students. “Kim Smith went up to him after the talk and said, ‘I’ll write the business plan with you,’” Lee recalls. “She reached out to me, and I helped, as an independent-study project.” After graduation, while Smith stayed to start NewSchools, Lee went to work for the consulting firm McKinsey & Company as a management consultant, then left to help start Aspire Public Schools — which became NewSchools’ first charter-school investment.
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Executives connected to NewSchools can be found throughout the education world. Joanne Weiss, formerly the group’s chief operating officer, left in 2009 to run the Race to the Top Fund, the federal Department of Education’s $4.35 billion interstate school-reform competition. She is now chief of staff to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. In October, the White House announced that President Obama will nominate Ted Mitchell, the CEO of NewSchools, to be Under Secretary of Education.
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As with all institutions, public schools, which came into being more than a century ago, don’t always function the way they should. But critics, including charter-school detractors, say that NewSchools, and other funding organizations like it, have no business trying to change public schools from the outside, without regard to the parents, teachers or voters most closely allied to the schools. NewSchools counters that its programs aim to fill the gap between what exists and what education reformers think ought to exist in schools.
“NewSchools invests in things that if you were starting now and you were trying to attack X or Y problem, you would do it differently,” says Jal D. Mehta, an associate professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, who studies how to create high-quality schools.
The NewSchools model depends on connecting their portfolio companies to one another. Companies belonging to the NewSchools seed fund get a network of advisers who consult with the startups on business issues like health-care plans, modeled after “keiretsu,” the cooperation among Japanese companies with interrelated owners. Jennifer Carolan, a former teacher who is managing director of the seed fund, checks in with her investments frequently, sending around research papers to the CEOs and connecting them to services and advice if they need it. It’s the same system John Doerr used at Kleiner Perkins, adapted to the education market.
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“Jen has brought some of the best practices of teaching into the entrepreneurial community,” says Betsy Corcoran, CEO of EdSurge, an education-technology firm that aims to help teachers connect with companies developing products for schools. In the summer of 2012, NewSchools invested $100,000 into EdSurge, based in Burlingame, Calif., as part of a $400,000 pre-seed funding round that also included the Washington Post Co. and several Silicon Valley angel investors.
For Corcoran, a longtime tech journalist who co-founded EdSurge in 2010, NewSchools’ investment gave her fledgling company an imprimatur of legitimacy, she says.
“It brings a web of connections, a sense that they really have done diligence on the companies and they believe there’s a mission as well as an emerging business model,” Corcoran says. “That level of credibility is at least as important as the actual money they’re giving you.”
With that seed money, EdSurge has continued to build its community of teachers and entrepreneurs. The website now has an index of some 700 education-technology products, with reviews. The company’s first summit in November 2013 in Mountain View, Calif., featured 600 teachers examining education-technology offerings from 30 companies and filling out 1,500 feedback forms, which will appear on the site.
Speaking at the event, Jennifer Carolan told the assembled teachers, “You have an enormous impact on our children, and it is my sincere hope that we can make your job just a tiny bit easier with some of the tools that you’ll see here today.”
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Will Bringing Big Data Into the Classroom Help Students Learn Better?

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Brad McIlquham was tutoring at-risk youth in Durham, N.C., when a former co-worker gave him the educator’s equivalent of the Social Network pitch. What if, instead of teaching at most 50 kids a year, you could help bring personalized tutoring to 100,000, or a million kids?
McIlquham’s co-worker, Jose Ferreira — who had taught SAT and GMAT prep with McIlquham at Kaplan — was proposing an upending of the traditional “teach to the middle” classroom model. When teachers instruct students of varying ability in the same class, some students get bored, while others struggle. And often, teachers don’t discover which students have failed to understand key concepts until their tests get graded. But by then, they’ve already fallen behind. In the meantime, all the potentially useful data from students’ individual homework assignments, quizzes and textbook exercises — everything but the final grade — disappear into the ether.
Ferreira came up with an idea to capture that data and use it to create digital education tools that help tailor the curriculum to each student as he or she learns — by detecting gaps in knowledge early on, recommending the appropriate exercises to help students acquire skill and alerting teachers when students are struggling. “Our goal is to personalize education,” says McIlquham, now director of academics of the education startup called Knewton that Ferreira founded, “to take educational content and understand not only the ins and outs of that content, but how students interact with it — when students run into difficulties, when they start to forget things — and use it to customize the educational experience.”
Knewton, which launched in 2008, bills itself as an adaptive learning “platform,” a behind-the-scenes service that schools can use to personalize their existing digital coursework. Assisted by Knewton, schools can monitor students’ progress as they work through lessons and make sure students are grasping the material before moving on. In its early years, Knewton was designing its own digital coursework. But since 2011, it has partnered with the textbook publishing company Pearson, combining its analytics tools with that company’s educational material; and last summer Knewton announced a similar partnership with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publishing company. So far, Knewton’s also received $105 million in funding from Pearson and a collection of venture capital firms.
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Knewton didn’t invent adaptive learning: There are a lot of digital education tools that tailor coursework to individual students, giving them more difficult problems as they get better at solving them, for example. The technology has become increasingly popular with the growth of the “flipped classroom,” a way of organizing courses so that students watch video lectures and do reading at home, then do coursework and exercises in class, where teachers are there to help them.
Knewton brings advanced data analysis to this model, looking at factors like how much time students spend on specific questions and whether they consistently fall for certain false answers. “This shows a misconception, that they’re thinking about a concept in the wrong way,” McIlquham says. It’s something that might be easy to fix, but would be difficult to detect from looking at the results of a single test.
McIlquham emphasizes that this kind of adaptive process is a boon to teachers as well as to students, giving them new insight into what lessons are working, what concepts need to be revisited and which students are falling behind. “Teachers will be so much better equipped when they walk into the classroom,” he says.
As Knewton gathers more and more data, McIlquham says, it will also be able to figure out patterns in learning, drawing connections between certain types of students and what learning methods work best for them — a sort of Netflix-style “people who did well with this exercise also did well with this” recommendation engine. “If you’re a similar student and you struggled with something I struggled with, we can see that if I learned it the same way, data suggests you’ll learn well that way too,” explains McIlquham.
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Knewton will have a lot of data to work with. Through its partnerships with Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, it is now “powering” interactive education programs for 3 million students, and will reach up to 10 million by the end of 2014, from kindergarten all the way through college.
Mcllquham envisions an educational system where grade levels and semesters fall away, and students progress at their own pace, learning key concepts in small groups with help from a teacher. One of Knewton’s earliest test programs involved remedial math students at Arizona State University, which contracted with Knewton in 2011 to design an adaptive math program. ASU had a dropout problem. Some of its remedial students had been away from school for 10 years and needed a quick refresher, while others had never received basic math education in the first place. When these students were dumped into the same classroom, few received the right kind of instruction and many dropped out.
Knewton’s program let more advanced students skip concepts they already understood and focus on ones they didn’t, while an instructor went from student to student giving individual help. Initial figures from Knewton’s adaptive program at ASU showed that withdrawal rates dropped by half after two semesters and the proportion of students getting passing grades rose from 64 percent to 75 percent. Almost half the students finished their classes four weeks early. McIlquham says this sort of variable pacing and small-group instruction could become the norm.
Some observers have pointed out that while go-at-your-own-pace learning works well for some students, it can allow less motivated students to fall far behind. There are also questions about whether adaptive learning can extend beyond basic introductory classes, and whether it would work with less quantifiable, more intuitive subject matter, like literature and philosophy.
McIlquham thinks that adaptive education will free up teachers in any setting for more one-on-one instruction with students, and help them figure out which students need special attention. “Teachers are going to have so much more relevant information about their classes available to them,” says McIlquham. “As a teacher myself I’m excited about that. I’m much happier working with students on problem solving, critical thinking and issues they’re having, than standing up in front of a class and lecturing as if they’re all the same student.”
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Food Cowboy: Teaching Truck Drivers ‘Nothing Goes to Waste’

Posted on by robbie

It’s 2:30 on a recent Monday morning in Washington, D.C., and most of the city is still and dark. But near the intersection of New York and Florida Avenues in the northeast area known as Brookland, there is a flurry of activity at the loading dock outside S.W. Produce Inc., a small wholesaler. There, underneath bright-yellow fluorescent lights, truck after truck backs up to the concrete dock to unload crates filled with squash, cabbage, oranges and other produce, after making the journey from places as far away as Florida, Georgia or the Carolinas.
Jerry Pence, a thin, bearded trucker from Tennessee who seems so awake it could be 2:30 p.m., arrives with eight boxes of bruised zucchini that had spilled into the truck bed, all immediately rejected by the buyer. Pence must head to his next stop with an empty truck to make a pickup. “They’re good squash. If you want ’em you can have ’em!” Pence says to the folks at the dock. But they didn’t order zucchini and they have no use for them, so those eight boxes eventually make their way to the giant metal dumpsters that sit just next to the loading dock. “If there are hungry people who want these squash, I’d be happy to give them to ’em,” Pence says.
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That’s exactly what Roger Gordon, co-founder of Food Cowboy, aims to do. Gordon was at the loading dock that early morning to build relationships with the truck drivers and to persuade them and their employers to join his venture. His one-year-old startup, Food Cowboy, systematically connects truckers to food banks with the mantra that “Nothing Goes to Waste.”
“We’re very picky eaters,” Gordon says. “Retailers won’t even try to sell anything that doesn’t look just right.” Distributors often don’t have time to find a home for perishable food that stores won’t accept, he goes on to explain, and so much of it is thrown out — nearly 36 million tons, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Food Cowboy’s goal is to redirect it to the hungry.
Gordon, 46, started the organization with the help of his brother, Richard, a truck driver who’d grown all too accustomed to hauling food that was perfectly edible, though not aesthetically pleasing, to dumpsters or landfills.
Richard explains that he and Roger started talking about Food Cowboy “after I had to dump 20,000 pounds of organic green beans.” The refrigeration unit in his truck had broken, and the temperature had risen slightly before he could get it fixed. He estimates that the green beans lost only half a day of shelf life in that time, but the customer still rejected the entire shipment. “Roger and I spent a lot of time trying to donate the load, but there wasn’t anywhere close by that could accept all that food,” he says. “If we had a way of reaching all the food banks faster, we might have been more successful.”
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While there are other organizations working to curtail food waste like CropMobsters, Food Recovery Network and City Harvest, the brothers found that there was no group working directly with truck drivers to help at this level of the food-supply chain. The brothers felt they could offer the food banks a good business opportunity. Food Cowboy charges food banks a 10-cent routing service fee per pound of produce — considerably less than the 67 cents a pound that food banks would normally pay on average to buy fresh vegetables wholesale, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
But getting the food from truckers to food banks proved far from easy. “The challenge is that food banks operate Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. The rest of the food industry operates 24/7,” Gordon says. Food Cowboy has to persuade food banks to open up for those 2:30 a.m. drop-offs, and then has to find places with the manpower — and sometimes forklifts — to handle the massive loads that come off of trailer trucks.
And then there is the problem of persuading the food companies to allow the donation of rejected shipments in the first place. After all, there is the potential for lawsuits if the food makes someone sick. But Food Cowboy has found success relying on the food banks’ own quality-control measures as well as Good Samaritan laws, which protect them in the unlikely event that the food is contaminated.
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Gordon and his small staff of four — who work out of his D.C. row house — have spent the last year developing contacts at food banks across the country and building a database of places where they can direct truckers. They include Capital Area Food Bank, the largest food bank in the D.C. area. In 2012, Gordon learned through one of his brother’s connections that a shipment of 900 pounds of eggplant had recently been rejected because the vegetables, though perfectly edible, had been deemed too round and too dark to be marketable. They were destined for the dumps. Gordon was able to save the eggplants and redirect them to Capital Area Food Bank, where they were distributed to the nearly half a million people the food bank serves in the region.
Food Cowboy also brokers relationships on a smaller scale, for which they do not charge a transaction fee. Gordon introduced DC Central Kitchen, a local soup kitchen, to Mexican Fruits, a produce shop only about a five-minute drive from the soup kitchen. DC Central Kitchen can call Mexican Fruits to see if they have any produce that’s still good, but getting too old to sell. If so, they pick up the food, which Mexican Fruits donates, and serve it to hungry Washingtonians. This relationship has resulted in several pickups of food that would otherwise have gone to waste.
Amy Bachman, a manager at DC Central Kitchen, notes how helpful this relationship has been. “Food Cowboy connected us with a food source we didn’t have before,” Bachman says. “We probably wouldn’t have known about Mexican Fruits without them.”
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Gordon and his team currently field more than 20 calls each month from truckers across the country, and have helped folks in states as far away as California and North Dakota. Usually they pair truckers individually with food banks. But recently Food Cowboy has begun to expand its operation by creating an online system that allows truckers to find open food banks along their routes that will accept their edible rejected shipments. “We’re trying to make the whole process as efficient as possible,” Gordon says.
They’ve also started a Twitter campaign called “The Great Food Roundup,” with an associated app, which allows people to notify Food Cowboy anytime they see wasted food that could be redistributed. “The goal is to crowdsource a food-waste map of the United States,” Gordon says. “It will give people like Amy a much more robust map of donors they can work with.”
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Giving Special Needs Kids a Chance, Not Charity

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Isaiah Pridgen, a second-grader from Northeast Washington, D.C., has chubby cheeks and an inquisitive approach to all conversations. On a cloudless afternoon last fall, he waited excitedly in line at Simple Changes Therapeutic Riding Center in Northern Virginia for his turn to mount a horse. It wasn’t his first time — to hear him tell it, as he constantly pushes his thick-framed, black sports glasses back up his nose, he’s practically an old ranch hand.
Isaiah was one of many children at the Lorton, Va., center that day participating in an “Extreme Recess” event hosted by Dreams for Kids DC. The nonprofit, whose original Chicago chapter was founded by lawyer Tom Tuohy in 1989, organizes adaptive sports events — like horseback riding, golfing or water skiing — for low-income children and for those with developmental and physical disabilities. The program isn’t designed to make athletes out of the kids, but rather to give them an opportunity to interact with their peers and mentors in a safe social setting, without having to fear being stigmatized, excluded or isolated.
“A lot of participants don’t feel like they’re always able to connect with other people sometimes, whether it’s because they’re in different classes at school or how they’re raised,” says Glenda Fu, executive director of Dreams for Kids DC, and the organization’s only full-time staff member. “But it’s great to see kids who are more shy or antisocial bond with one of our volunteers and have smiles on their faces.”
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The nonprofit’s ultimate goal is to empower at-risk children, particularly those with disabilities like Down syndrome or multiple sclerosis, who often don’t have access to the same physical and social activities as other kids. Yet everyone has the same desire to make friends, participate in sports or other pastimes, and feel like they’re part of a group — experiences that are known to contribute to children’s overall health and well-being. Dreams for Kids DC’s events are largely centered on physical activities that are geared toward increasing children’s coordination and strength, fostering a sense of personal accomplishment and, most important, improving their self-esteem.
“One of the most universal things about sports is that regardless of whether you have special needs or not, you feel that thrill of being on the ice or throwing a football. I think that’s why these children love it,” says Fu.
It’s Isaiah’s turn to ride. Yogi, a large brown horse, trots to the mounting area and a pair of volunteers help the young boy into the saddle. With two volunteers by his side and his mother, Alysia, watching from beyond a wooden fence, Isaiah sits as Yogi moves forward. But a few paces in, Isaiah starts to panic: “Mom! Mom! I don’t want to ride him! I don’t want to!” he screams.
Yogi stops moving and remains calm. Alysia walks to her son and soothes him. The group soon starts moving again, slowly, and circles the pasture. Isaiah, appearing quite pleased, dismounts and runs to the back of the line. He looks up at his mom and asks, “Can I ride him again? Please?”
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Isaiah and his family have been attending Dreams for Kids DC’s Extreme Recess events for three years. Like many of the 1,200 families served annually by the nonprofit, Isaiah’s family lives in a low-income area of the city and Isaiah was diagnosed with autism at age 3.  Over the years, Isaiah has skated with the Washington Capitals, thrown passes with the Redskins and shot hoops with the Mystics. He’s learned how to make pizza and to downhill ski. Alysia, who works as a help-desk analyst, says none of this would have been possible for her son without the help of Dreams for Kids DC.
There are many organized athletic programs for children with disabilities, such as the Special Olympics, the American Association of Adapted Sports Programs and the Inclusive Fitness Coalition, which are becoming increasingly popular at schools and in neighborhoods across the country. Like Dreams for Kids, these programs aim to encourage friendship, fair play and physical fitness, but the difference is that they require a sustained commitment from participants. Dreams for Kids’ activities, by contrast, are discrete events — families can attend as many or as few as they are able. The program is also targeted to underserved neighborhoods, and it’s free.
For the kids who participate, a single event can be life-changing. When a girl with autism, who has trouble communicating, scores her first goal against D.C. United superstar Perry Kitchen, or a boy whose family lives on a tight budget learns how to glide across a lake on water skis, it can make a tremendous difference in their development. “At my first Extreme Recess, golfing, there was a boy who needed a walker. When he got to the tee, he pushed [the walker] away and stood there by himself, golfing away,” says volunteer Heather Murfitt, a senior at Cazenovia College in upstate New York, who interned with Dreams for Kids DC in 2011. “Watching that was one of the most awesome things I’ve ever seen.”
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Since then, Murfitt, who is also a multimedia artist, has donated half of the proceeds from her art shows to the organization.
The horseback riding event at Simple Changes — which also treated the 40 kids in attendance to face painting, pony painting, a tour of a fire truck and plenty of pizza — was one of 16 Extreme Recesses held by Dreams for Kids DC in 2013. “Not everything out there is geared toward a child who’s unable to do something everyone else can do,” says Tracey Murphy, whose 10-year-old daughter rode a white pony name Dixie twice that day. “This is just wonderful.”
A volunteer, Lia Winnard, 17, kept a watchful eye on Dixie for most of the afternoon, guiding the majestic animal in circles while joyful youngsters mounted and dismounted, sometimes more than once. She knows firsthand what it’s like to grow up with a disability, having battled violent seizures since childhood as a result of mild cerebral palsy. After graduating from high school, Winnard plans to attend Longwood University in Farmville, Va., where she’ll study therapeutic recreation for the treatment of people with disabilities. “So many people have helped me all these years,” she says. “I just feel like I need to give back.”
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The Death of the Hanging Chad: How to Build a Better Ballot

Posted on by robbie

There were few hotter spots on the political map in 2012 than the state of Ohio. President Barack Obama and Republican Party nominee Mitt Romney visited the swing state no fewer than 83 times combined over the course of the calendar year. And for good reason: Ohio has picked the winning presidential candidate in every election since 1960.
Heading into Election Day, polls showed the president had a narrow edge. On election night, Fox News, among others, called Ohio for Obama, putting him over the top and effectively ending the evening. The veteran Republican operative Karl Rove flipped out. Angry Republicans demanded a recount, arguing that fraud had influenced the result. It could have been a replay of Florida 2000.
But it wasn’t — thanks, in some small measure, to the efforts of a design consultant named Dana Chisnell. She’s the person election bureaus call to create bulletproof ballots, ones that are clear enough and understandable enough to ensure that every vote counts. For the 2012 election, Chisnell had some specific thoughts for Ohio: Simplify the instructions on the ballot, for starters, and put all the candidates in the race in one column — elements that were missing in Ohio in the 2008 election, when many confused constituents ended up voting twice. “I was confident that the ballots were fine this time,” says Chisnell about the 2012 vote. “When I was talking to the TV on election night, I said, ‘I know it’s not the ballots, you can recount all you want.’”
Fixing how a ballot looks seems like it should be a simple task — choose a design, and stick to it — but in fact each state has its own voting culture, with unique laws and customs that influence its balloting. Oregon and Washington have gone to all vote-by-mail systems, while other states favor electronic touch screens or paper optical scan ballots. New York actually reverted to decades-old lever machines after having multiple problems with newer technology. The result: no one-size-fits-all ballot.
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Into this confusion stepped Chisnell. Fourteen years ago, she was living in San Francisco and running a private consulting business, advising firms on how to improve the language and look of their websites by talking to users and testing the results. The year was 2000, and the country was in the throes of its ballot woes.
The infamous butterfly ballot, a staggered two-page layout with candidate names on alternating sides of a central punch-button column, had caused much confusion among Florida voters. Palm Beach County’s election supervisor had made the fateful mistake of enlarging the type on the ballot to accommodate Sunbelt voters’ aging eyes — unwittingly throwing off the alignment in the process. “It was pretty easy to vote for Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore,” says Chisnell, who observed the saga unfolding on TV. “All the crazy recounts were happening not because of a security problem but because of a basic design problem. People had voted for candidates they didn’t intend to because of the design of the ballots.
Chisnell watched, fascinated by on-the-street interviews with grannies complaining that they felt tricked because the ballot was difficult to use. (She has since learned that about 20 percent of Florida voters were exposed to hard-to-read ballots.) This got her thinking: Aren’t there any professional designers involved in creating ballots? She asked around and none of her peers were. She began to search the Internet for ways she could help.
After checking out various government websites, she came across a five-person Ballot Simplification Committee in San Francisco — “It’s like Iron Chef for editors,” says Chisnell — that was responsible for writing the plain-language descriptions of ballot measures. It took a few years, but she wangled her way onto the committee, obtaining an appointment by the mayor. Chisnell, then 43, was the youngest person in the group by far. “There aren’t that many people who can spend 10 weeks a year working for free on this,” says Chisnell, who served from 2005 to 2009 on the pro bono committee. (Luckily, her day-job clients cut her some slack during exhausting election weeks.)
“Dana was really beneficial to the committee,” says Barbara Carr, management assistant at the San Francisco Department of Elections who served as the clerk on the committee. “She was good at making things clearer without losing the meaning.”
Chisnell resigned from the committee when she moved in 2009 to Boston (for love — she’s getting married this spring), but she’s made ballots an ongoing passion project. She went on to work on the Design for Democracy project — a group dedicated to using design tools to make ballots and voting more understandable; it researched and set forth the best practices for creating printed ballots, optical scan ballots, signs and posters at polling places. But Chisnell realized that getting various state election officials to implement the project’s 300 pages of findings would be tough. What’s more, the Election Assistance Commission in Silver Spring, Md., the major government backer of ballot research, was being gutted; research money was drying up. Chisnell and her colleagues feared that their findings would just sit there, gathering dust.
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One day, in the summer of 2011, after Chisnell had given a speech about the issue at a conference in Portland, Ore., a man approached her — “I had hoped he was a wealthy donor!” says Chisnell — and suggested she do a Kickstarter project to make use of her findings. With his help, she did. Working with colleagues Whitney Quesenbery and Drew Davies, Chisnell came up with the idea of raising money to create tiny field-guide booklets with easy-to-implement, actionable tips — the boiled-down essence of their research. “It was a stroke of genius on Dana’s part to take the big pile of paper and get it down to something cute,” says Quesenbery. “If it’s cute, it can’t be that hard to implement.”
Among her colleagues’ suggestions: Don’t use all upper-case letters, because they’re harder to read. Avoid centered type. Pick one sans serif font instead of many. And use shading and contrast to help voters navigate the different races featured on the ballot. “Simple things have had the most impact,” says Chisnell.
Chisnell launched a successful Kickstarter campaign in April 2012 to fund the creation of the Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent series. Her slogan: Democracy is a design problem. She emailed her entire address book, begging family and friends for money and asking them to do the same. With the support of 320 backers, Chisnell raised $20,761, exceeding her goal of $15,000. “The payoff wasn’t really the funding, but meeting a community of people who are really interested in this topic,” says Chisnell.
The Kickstarter campaign also caught the attention of the people at the MacArthur Foundation, which awarded Chisnell and her team of 30 volunteers a $75,000 grant. The money went to the creation, promotion and distribution of eight booklets on topics such as designing usable ballots, writing instructions that voters can easily understand and sprucing up election department websites. The money also financed two more studies on creating more effective county election websites and printed voter education material.
The guides are now in their third printing, with 1,500 sets being used in 43 states and in four Canadian and European provinces. Demand has exceeded supply. Georgia requested one set for every county. So did Ohio. “The measure of success is whether we have fewer spoiled ballots, fewer calls to the call center and fewer recounts,” says Chisnell, who notes that outcomes have been anecdotal. “We do [have all that], although it’s hard to say this is all because of the field guides, but we are pretty confident they’re making a difference.”
Election officials certainly agree. In the fateful 2012 elections in Ohio, Chisnell’s counsel was a godsend. “We took as many of the suggestions as we could from her,” says Matt Masterson, deputy chief of staff for the Ohio secretary of state, who noted that almost all of Chisnell’s ideas involved no additional costs. “She really made the ballot easier to use.” And her ideas worked. “Based on what we saw with the 2012 election undervotes and overvotes, time in the ballot box and general feedback from the boards,” says Masterson, “we have no doubt that the suggestions Dana provided had a positive impact.”
These days, Chisnell is still working to make every vote count. She testified before the Presidential Commission on Election Administration in Pennsylvania and Ohio about using ballot design to improve the election experience, especially in response to the long lines at the polls in 2012. She and Quesenbery have started the Center for Civic Design, which they hope to make into a funded research center. She’s also looking for ways to make multilingual ballots easier to use.
“Dana is one of the entrepreneurs in this field,” says Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, who has worked closely with her. “There is a huge need for the work she is doing and not a lot of support for it. She is making change happen through her own will.”
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The Foodie Caucus: In Texas, Politicians Push Good Eats for All

Posted on by robbie

The old saw “politics makes strange bedfellows” doesn’t seem to hold much weight anymore in Washington, a city where a pillow fight would be a welcome change from the trench warfare that has settled in.
Take the national farm bill, once a vehicle for bringing together those strange bedfellows — urban liberals and rural conservatives — to make farmers happy and to feed the urban needy. Earlier this month, legislators finally passed the nearly $1 trillion bill, but not before arguing rancorously, for four years, over crop subsidies and cuts to the federal food-stamp program.
Meanwhile, in Texas, where one-party domination by Republicans would seem to preclude the need for legislative alliances, there’s a promising act of cooperation: the Farm-to-Table caucus, a “first in the nation” (according to its founders) bipartisan caucus that focuses on promoting the local production of healthy food and helping consumers gain access to it.
Call it the foodie caucus, it was co-founded by State Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, a Democrat from Austin whose district includes working-class neighborhoods, a couple of urban farms and some of the city’s hippest new restaurants, and State Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, a Republican who hails from the rural town of Brenham, east of Austin, home to the much-loved Blue Bell ice creamery. The joint effort has been spreading the word to both policymakers and to the public about the goodness of sustainable, locally grown foods — produced by family farms, ranches and fisheries, along with urban farms — and reducing the regulatory obstacles that hinder their sale.
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“For many, food means freedom, and we must make sure we lower the barriers to that freedom,” says Rodriguez.
In 2013, for example, the House passed a bill introduced by State Rep. David Simpson, a Republican caucus member, to allow sampling at farmers’ markets. Previously, health regulations prohibited consumers from, say, tasting a local grower’s carrots before buying. Regulations also prevented makers of “cottage products” — homemade baked and canned goods like candies, pickles, herbs, vinegars and the like — from selling their wares, but another caucus-sponsored bill did away with that hurdle. Not all the Farm-to-Table legislative efforts have met with success, however: An effort to reduce restrictions on the sale of raw milk products failed. Additionally, Rodriguez was unable to move along a bill for property tax breaks for urban farmers — unlike larger commercial farms, smaller operations don’t receive agricultural tax relief — but he says he will pick up the issue again in 2015.
“The Farm-to-Table caucus is representative of an underlying dynamic that food issues really do cut across partisan barriers,” says Judith McGeary, founder of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, an advocacy group in Cameron, Texas, for independent ranchers, farmers and homesteaders. “One of the great things about the food movement — and you see it on the ground if you walk into, say, a sustainable ag conference in Texas or anywhere in the country — is the people come from the full political spectrum.”
The caucus began in 2011 — the Texas Legislature meets in odd-numbered years — and was formalized in 2013. It now has 18 Democratic members and 10 Republicans. All members share a passion for the cause, but they come from different perspectives, McGeary says. For some, the concern is health and environmental issues; others are focused on child obesity, food security or hunger; and still others have a passion for “old-fashioned family values,” she says.
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The collaborative spirit hasn’t reached every corner of Texas politics. The legislative process is still adversarial, and some of the caucus’ measures draw opposition from powerful groups and regulators who are concerned about health issues and loss of tax revenue, McGeary says. But what has clearly worked is the bridge-building between rural and urban legislators: In 2012, the Texas House of Representatives’ Urban Affairs Committee had a meeting with the Agriculture and Livestock Committee, where members discussed the needs of urban farmers. “For the first time, rural issues are getting the attention they deserve” from urban legislators, says McGeary, noting that his city counterparts are becoming aware of these issues through food-savvy constituents who are concerned about where their food comes from and how sustainable it is.
Increasingly, in fact, the “food movement” is turning traditionally rural matters into urban ones. Ask Dr. Linda Willis, director of the county office of the Texas Agrilife Extension Service, in Houston. Funded at the state and federal level, the extension service has historically served rural communities, offering farmers and their families professional advice and opportunities, but in recent years Dr. Willis has been busy developing programs to promote agriculture and food access among city-dwellers, many of whom are poor and living in so-called food deserts, areas where access to grocery stores or other sources of healthy food is limited or nonexistent.
Dr. Willis’ office works with more than 400 master gardeners, who volunteer to show families and community groups how to garden and harvest fresh foods. They’ve also helped create gardens in 60 area schools. The extension service also runs a master wellness program, training volunteers how to maintain healthy lifestyles so that they, in turn, can teach others in the community to do the same — a strategy that Dr. Willis hopes will stem the rising tide of diet- and lifestyle-related illness and disability.
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“One of the areas we can build a lot of consensus around is — whether you live in a food desert or not, whether you represent a food desert or not — the cost of health care is eventually going to impact all of us,” says Dr. Willis, who works closely with community leaders and urban lawmakers.
That’s a reality that motivates Farm-to-Table caucus member State Rep. Borris Miles, a Democrat who grew up in an area of southeast Houston that he describes as a food desert. In 2011, Miles co-sponsored a bill with a Republican, State Sen. Craig Estes from Wichita Falls in north Texas, to establish the Urban Loan Microenterprise Support Program, which helps fund fruit and vegetable growers in cities with more than 500,000 residents.
Miles summed up the caucus’ work this way in August 2013, at the first annual Houston Urban Food Production Conference: “In the direction in which this country is going, we have to be more self-sustaining, especially when it comes to health and resources of our own, this is going to be the start of something big across this country. When things get tough and times get hard, we just go right back to the basics of what got us here. And if farming the earth got us where we are, then we need to go right back to it. I’m excited about that.”
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Correction: February 21, 2014
An earlier version of this story misspelled the surname of the founder of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance. She is Judith McGeary, not McGreary.

Are You One Skill Away From Your Dream Job? Meet the Man Who Will Help You Find Out

Posted on by robbie

When it comes to serving his community, Jason Green has a lot to live up to. He’s the son of a preacher, and the great great grandson of Garey Green, a carpenter who helped build his Maryland town’s first school for African American children in 1874 — offering opportunity when there was none. Walking through the creaky two-room school house, which still stands today, Jason can’t help but feel inspired. “Knowing that with minimal resources, this community was able to educate an entire generation is a motivator for me.” Last year Jason left his job as an associate council to President Obama, moved back home and started a small company called SkillSmart — a 21st century education tool. 
SkillSmart, which launches this summer, is an online platform that connects job seekers with employers based on their skills. “I want to help people see where one skill can be transferable to another career, and figure out how to get there,” he says. The site will also identify what skills are in demand, and helps individuals find the training resources to become more marketable in the workforce. Watch to learn more about the program and the family history that inspired Jason to start it.
 
 
 

Foster Kids Need One Thing to Succeed in School. A Former Teacher’s Goal Is to Give It to Every Single One

Posted on by robbie

Robert Torres clings to a well-worn notebook covered with a photograph of his two children as though it were a lifeline. He beams at the image of his kids, ages 5 and 8, and scans the papers inside, which are his notes on how to communicate with their school, a schedule for their after-school activities, general guidelines for helping them with homework and important contact information in case Torres has a panicked moment.
One year ago, Torres was in serious trouble. The single father could barely keep his head afloat at his construction job, let alone handle the seemingly endless reports of his son’s violent explosions at school. After a tumultuous few months, the children were taken from him by the state and placed in foster care in Watsonville, Calif.
Then came a turning point. In court, Torres (whose name has been changed to protect his children’s privacy) was invited to join a pilot program, called the Foster Youth Education Initiative (FosterEd). This initiative trains parents and caregivers to get more involved with their children’s therapists, teachers, counselors and even school bus drivers. Torres says it was a life changer: “I feel like a whole new man because of the stuff these people have taught me.”
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Most parents, especially those who are educated and well off, help their children navigate the school system. They check on homework, establish goals, communicate regularly with the teachers and set up meetings with the principal if they suspect there’s a problem. But for other parents and guardians, the school system is an impenetrable fortress. “I dropped out of school in ninth grade,” Torres says. “I didn’t know how to deal with school. I didn’t know there was help out there. I didn’t know the words.”
The problem is especially acute for the half million children in foster care in the United States. As a group, foster kids are the most likely to perform below grade level, miss classes, face suspensions and, ultimately, drop out or get expelled. As grownups, 50 percent of former foster children file for unemployment at least once, 33 percent receive public assistance, 25 percent experience periods of homelessness and 25 percent are eventually incarcerated. All too often, these children have spent their young lives surrounded by parents (biological and foster) who simply are not well versed in the practical or long-term importance of schooling.
Research into foster children shows a clear correlation between their educational struggles and their chaotic home life — and how this gravely affects their future. Enter FosterEd. It is the brainchild of Jesse Hahnel, an attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, who believes that if foster children had someone advocating for their education, at least some of those dire statistics might be alleviated. At the heart of his program is a fairly straightforward idea: Provide every foster child with someone who cares deeply about his or her education.
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Much of the attention at FosterEd is placed on closing communication gaps between schools, state departments and the foster children themselves. FosterEd chooses a state (Indiana, California and Arizona, so far) and sets up a pilot program. Using a combination of private and public funds, it hires a team of “liaisons” to meet regularly with state departments, the schools, foster parents and, often, biological parents. After getting to know each child’s circumstances and support system, a liaison will ask one of the child’s biological or foster parents, teachers, relatives or perhaps a state-provided volunteer to become an “educational champion” for that child. The champion constantly reinforces the importance of education to the child. He or she meets with the child daily to discuss their homework and school day and to stress why attendance is mandatory. The champion goes to parent-teacher conferences, schedules after-school activities and makes sure the child is getting on the bus every single day.
It’s exactly the kind of behavior that these parents — biological and foster —often find foreign. “I’ve worked with a lot of parents who have not had a good experience themselves as a student,” says Kim Corneille, a FosterEd liaison in California. “There is a level of discomfort, of not feeling familiar with the school environment.”
The liaisons, meanwhile, remain involved. They answer phone calls and emails from champions and meet with them weekly. They each track the records, report cards, court dates and transcripts of up to 50 different children. They attend parent-teacher conferences, talk to the social workers and teach the champions how to use the local libraries and apply for after-school programs. They show champions how to find detailed mentoring support on the FosterEd website. By design, these FosterEd liaisons are eventually hired by the state system. FosterEd moves on so the state can run the program on its own and spread its practices beyond the pilot. “The state oversees and guides the work,” Hahnel says. “We want them to own it. We let them design what they want [permanently] in the state.”
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Hahnel, now 38, was a public school teacher in New York City at the now shuttered, low-performing Louis D. Brandeis High School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He decided he might have a larger impact as an attorney who advocates for at-risk students. Hahnel attended Stanford Law School, where he first learned of the extreme educational challenges facing foster youth. “That’s when I had my eyes opened,” he says. “The state has a unique moral and legal responsibility to these children. Improving the educational outcomes of foster children cannot be accomplished by education, child welfare or judicial agencies working by themselves. These agencies must take joint responsibility. Each must adopt new policies and practices to ensure these children succeed in school and have the opportunity to flourish as adults.”
In 2008 a Skadden Fellowship — an award established by the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and Affiliates — provided the seed funding Hahnel needed to start the program, which he developed over two years as team leader at the National Center for Youth Law.
Indiana is one of FosterEd’s first success stories. Since 2011, FosterEd has been fully established in the state, where about 1,500 foster children (of the approximately 9,000 total in the state) have been matched with educational champions by the FosterEd team. Anita Silverman, director of education for the Indiana Department of Child Services, says FosterEd’s “biggest triumph” has been its ability to promote collaboration and communication between the schools (which are often unaware that students are foster children) and the department of child services. Silverman recalls a teacher who learned through her FosterEd connection that one of her special education students was about to be kicked out of a foster home. “She started as an educational champion and is soon going to have a new name of mom [for that child],” she says. “That’s the biggest honor you can get.”
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Adoption, of course, is a rare occurrence. But more common successes are steadily being reported from Indiana. There, according to an independent evaluation of the program’s outcomes, the liaisons have been able to resolve 89 percent of the matched FosterEd children’s educational issues, such as truancy, behavior or special education concerns.
In January 2014 the initiative officially launched as a pilot in Pima County, Ariz., where it will serve approximately 1,000 foster children over the next two years. The goal is to use the pilot as the basis for a new statewide program and practices that will eventually help Arizona’s 14,000 foster children succeed in school. After the statewide program is established, Arizona will own the program and FosterEd will move on to another state.
In California, where the pilot has been under way since spring, FosterEd is helping change legislation. In June, California became the first state where schools and school districts are being held accountable for the educational outcomes of its approximately 42,000 foster children. This means California must now track foster students’ Academic Performance Index scores as a subgroup, just as it does for English learners and disabled and minority students. California’s education and child welfare agencies also must notify school districts if one of its students is in foster care, helping teachers and administrators spot potential problems sooner.
“I think what makes FosterEd innovative and interesting is that they take the lessons learned from the local level and do what is needed to make policy changes — they take these to the state to remove barriers,” says Susanna Kniffen, associate director of child welfare policy for Children Now, a California-based nonprofit. “Jesse [Hahnel] is amazing at bridging that gap between process and policy. Very few organizations are able to do that effectively.”
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Robert Torres, himself the product of a broken “dysfunctional” family, says FosterEd has given him a new understanding of raising children in a home that respects education. “How I’m treating my kids now is completely different than how I was raised,” he says. “I’m breaking the chain.”
Torres’ FosterEd liaison taught him how to communicate with teachers and administrators. Torres goes to parent-teacher conferences. He monitors his children’s homework daily and keeps an eye out for missing pages. He knows it’s important to ask his children about what’s happening during their school days. When he gets stuck, he refers to that notebook, which is loaded with contacts and language on how to address thorny issues such as who to call if his child is seriously struggling with reading or throwing temper tantrums about going to school. Since the spring, he has sought out testing for his son, who was diagnosed with ADHD and an emotional disorder, and got him transferred to a special-needs school. The children are thriving, and Torres holds out hope that he will someday live with them permanently. “I have more confidence now,” he says. “And my kids have more confidence because they see Daddy at school, making things happen.”
This is the kind of story Hahnel says he’d like to hear someday from all corners of the nation. “We are hoping that this program will spread to every state,” he says. “We are also hoping we don’t have to do it. It’s very time consuming and labor intensive. We don’t have the capacity right now to be in more than one state at once.”
The Center for the Study of Social Policy, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., recently recognized FosterEd as an exemplary initiative. “We are at a tipping point,” Hahnel says. “When enough states have these programs, when enough people become aware of this, there will be a groundswell.”
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