Teachers Are People Too

This KARA post from 2005 suggests a significant improvement in graduation rates in Minneapolis schools. No Child Left Behind really did leave behind a great many children.

From our 2005 piece;

Roosevelt High school graduated 28% of its students last year—Minneapolis and other big city schools averaged graduation rates between 50% and 60% nationwide. 25% of graduating U.S. high school seniors are functionally illiterate.

Teachers and school administrators are accused of bad stewardship. That is like blaming the police for who sits in the back seat of a squad car. It’s not their fault.We are all in this together, or as Pliny the elder said 2500 years ago, “what we do to our children, they will do to our society”

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California Child Protection Updates thru May 2017

KARA gathers news about abused abused children in America and around the world to provide a snapshot of Child Protection and how states and nations value their children.

Kids At Risk Action needs an aspiring writer/research to help gather and report on these stories.

If you are an aspiring writer/researcher with an urge to speak for your communities abused and neglected children,

Contact mike@invisiblechildren.org with REPORTING in the subject line.

All Adults Are the Protectors of All Children

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Going Backwards on Child Safety? (thank you Safe Passages for Children of MN)

Minnesota’s abused and neglected children need our voices. Share this with your networks;

Recently some legislators and child protection agencies began theorizing that an underlying cause of caseload increases is screening families into the system not because of maltreatment, but as a way to get them scarce social services.

Statistically, this seems unlikely.

According to the Department of Human Services, last year counties screened in 45% of 84,000 maltreatment reports. Since the screen-in rate for states nationally is 60%, this suggests that nearly 12,000 Minnesota children are still being inappropriately denied child protection help.

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Response to Our Friend Hector

I believe that the challenge addressed in this document has to do with ACES and other escalating problems in our society. Please let me know your thoughts.

Hector,

Sadly, the combination of American “bootstrap” culture, harsh individual freedom driven capitalism and defining success as “more money/winning at any cost” are denigrating social sciences/human services and anything else that gets in the way (including “science”).

Our institutions are paying a terrible price demonstrated by the cost of and underperformance in quality of life indices across the board (public health, public education, public safety).

This nation no longer leads the world in the things that make for a safe and livable society. We lead in teen STDs & pregnancies, prison populations, recidivism & incarcerated juveniles, poverty and in most financially rewarding areas of endeavor.

Add to that, the concurrent explosion of trauma related mental health problems (ACES) facing institutions service providers; educators, social and health workers, law enforcement, court and detention personnel are finding their level of training severely inadequate, jobs much more stressful and dangerous with a lack of success across most institutional venues.

The level of violence in hospitals, care & detention centers, foster homes and schools is high and growing and our reliance on Prozac like drugs in managing these problems bodes ill for any long term solutions (without treatment these problems grow exponentially)

Generational child abuse and trauma is the most misunderstood and powerful social disease present in this nation today and there are few signs of its abatement.

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