Join YTFG’s Safe Passage Conference Calls
The Youth Transition Funders Group is hosting two conference calls this fall to share how funders and communities are working together to help all of America s youth connect by age 25. Panelists will discuss pathways to college and careers, reform and alternatives to incarceration, and programs that help youth become financially independent after foster care .

The calls will also feature the new release of YTFG's publication Safe Passage and the Call to Action that offers policy checklists for states and communities.

The September 27, 2 pm ET, conference call – for advocates, policy experts and practitioners -- will feature reports from the field and from funders.

Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children’s President Joan Benso will report on Pennsylvania’s new task force on re-connecting youth and Laura Shubilla, President of the Philadelphia Youth Network, will report on Philadelphia’s out-of-school initiative. Constancia Warren will talk about the Carnegie Corporation’s dropout recovery initiative and the Connected by 25 project of YTFG's Out-of-School/Struggling Students Work Group. Julie Peterson will talk about key tenets for juvenile justice reform developed by the Juvenile Justice Work Group of YTFG.

Sign up by emailing janisrichter@msn.com.

The October 4, 2 pm ET, conference call – for state and local leaders—will feature new approaches to improving policies for youth at risk.

Howard Davidson, Director of the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law, will explain the ABA’s latest initiative for law, policy and practice reform related to youth at risk, highlighting policy recommendations.

Mala Thakur, Executive Director of the National Youth Employment Coalition, will discuss findings from NYEC’s recent examination of financing of alternative education pathways for struggling students and out of school youth. Examples include flexible funding that “follows the student,” schools and programs that tap into a variety of funding sources, and policy mechanisms that support the ability of schools/programs to tap into state and local education funding streams.

RSVP to janisrichter@msn.com.

Join YTFG’s Safe Passage Conference Calls
The Youth Transition Funders Group is hosting two conference calls this fall to share how funders and communities are working together to help all of America's youth connect by age 25. Panelists will discuss pathways to college and careers, reform and alternatives to incarceration, and programs that help youth become financially independent after foster care .

The calls will also feature the new release of YTFG's publication Safe Passage and the Call to Action that offers policy checklists for states and communities.

The September 27, 2 pm ET, conference call – for advocates, policy experts and practitioners -- will feature reports from the field and from funders.

Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children’s President Joan Benso will report on Pennsylvania’s new task force on re-connecting youth and Laura Shubilla, President of the Philadelphia Youth Network, will report on Philadelphia’s out-of-school initiative. Constancia Warren will talk about the Carnegie Corporation’s dropout recovery initiative and the Connected by 25 project of YTFG's Out-of-School/Struggling Students Work Group. Julie Peterson will talk about key tenets for juvenile justice reform developed by the Juvenile Justice Work Group of YTFG.

Sign up by emailing janisrichter@msn.com.

The October 4, 2 pm ET, conference call – for state and local leaders—will feature new approaches to improving policies for youth at risk.

Howard Davidson, Director of the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law, will explain the ABA’s latest initiative for law, policy and practice reform related to youth at risk, highlighting policy recommendations.

Mala Thakur, Executive Director of the National Youth Employment Coalition, will discuss findings from NYEC’s recent examination of financing of alternative education pathways for struggling students and out of school youth. Examples include flexible funding that “follows the student,” schools and programs that tap into a variety of funding sources, and policy mechanisms that support the ability of schools/programs to tap into state and local education funding streams.

RSVP to janisrichter@msn.com.

My cousin’s husband, Charlie Seymour, is a first grade teacher at James Monroe Elementary School in Santa Rosa, CA. Charlie is a rarity these days—he is the only male teacher at his school, and one of the few men teaching in his county. That makes Charlie part of the scant 9 percent of males who are elementary school teachers according to the most recent research available by the National Education Association. Only 24.9 percent of the nation's 3 million teachers are men.

When I saw Charlie last week, I could tell by the way he spoke about his job that he was a dedicated teacher. In the beginning of the summer, he taught remedial kindergarten for those students who didn’t have basic skills learned in kindergarten. Like many teachers, he was worried about the effects of NCLB on his students and the way he teaches; he mentioned that his students were being taught from a typical third-grade curriculum to meet adequate yearly progress. Charlie didn’t seem to mind that he was part of a profession dominated by women; he had more important things to think about.

Men aren’t the only minority in the teaching profession. African-Americans, particularly men, are also a scarcity. In Florida, for example, black men made up 3.2 percent of Florida teachers last fall according to a recent article in the Tallahassee Democrat. According to the article, low starting salaries was the most frequently cited reason that black men do not go into teaching.

So the stats are a little dismal. There is some hope, however: “Call Me Mister”, a program based at Clemson University in South Carolina, recruits, trains, certifies and finds jobs for black male teachers in the state’s public elementary schools where black men make up less than 1% of the elementary teaching community. The young men who become ‘Misters’ do not only represent a dedication to making a difference, but they also represent an accessible role model for kids who idealize athletes and entertainers.

I’m calling these young men ‘hope.’

In my five years as editor of Connect for Kids, a lot has changed. As I prepare to take my leave -- this will be my last entry to this blog, as I head off for some new adventures with my family in Nairobi, Kenya -- it's fun to look back and see how far we've come.

This web site was created as an experiment, to see if the communications potential of the Internet could be used to elevate public awareness of the issues that affect children and families, and to encourage individuals and communities to take action on behalf of children.

We used to worry that site visitors' internet connections might be overwhelmed by too many pictures. Now we can confidently post video and audio on the site, without worrying about causing too many crashes. And we've come a long way in understanding how people use the Internet, and how to present information in ways that engage our audience.

One of the most exciting developments, and one that seems likely to continue, is the explosion in the quantity and quality of information that is becoming available on the well-being of children, most of it accessible through the Web. A prime example is the No Child Left Behind law -- whatever its flaws, and there are many, NCLB is generating mountains of information that educators and concerned citizens can use to push for the kinds of school reform that make a difference to kids.

Meanwhile, even small nonprofits operating on shoe-string budgets are often able to maintain websites that offer a window on their work to the entire world -- sharing their ideas, insights, and hard-earned lessons on how to be effective.

For an organization like CFK, the challenge these days is trying to stay on top of this flood of information. I look forward to gaining a new perspective on the work in the months ahead, as I become just another loyal CFK site visitor, counting on my colleagues to keep me informed about the children's issues I care so much about.

Keep up your good work, and keep us informed...
Susan

I’m a product of the public schools—the public schools of New Orleans, no less. No, I’m not trying to be a poster child to lambast the Republicans for their proposal to spend $100 million on vouchers for low-income students in failing public schools around the country to attend private and religious schools.

Nah, I’m just here to say it’s possible. It’s possible to produce smart and curious students who attend public schools. It’s possible to hire and retain dedicated, passionate, and supportive teachers. Especially, when you analyze the results of a report released by the Department of Education (quietly on July 14), which showed that students attending public schools generally did as well as or better than comparable students in private schools.

Now how ‘bout funneling that $100 million into public schools throughout the country so that thousands more students benefit instead of the mere 28,000 this proposal would serve?

Jason Kamras is making the future look brighter for many Washington, DC students. Last April he was awarded with the title National Teacher of the Year, which was DC’s first. Kamras is profiled in today’s Washington Post ,and the article discusses his travels as the titular winner, his love of teaching math, and his positive remarks about No Child Left Behind (yes, *positive*, not a typo).

It’s worth mentioning that Kamras is a Princeton alum (Go, Tigers!), and began his teaching career with the Teach for America program in 1996. At Sousa Middle School in Southeast DC, the high school where he has taught for almost a decade, Kamras successfully pushed for more time spent on math, and as a result test scores dramatically rose.

I don’t need to say that we need more people—no, more teachers like Kamras. Schools are struggling to hire teachers, let alone good, certified, and passionate teachers. Teach for America tries to fill the void by recruiting and training graduating seniors from top-notch colleges for two-year teaching stints in disadvantaged urban and rural public schools. An article last month profiling the surge in TFA’s popularity mentioned that critics said that fewer than one-third of TFA’s teachers stay in the classroom following their two-year stints. But TFA, in the same article, said about two-thirds of these teachers have remained committed to education through research and policy work, if not through teaching. Kamras, in fact, says in the Post article that he would like to become more involved in policy work. But not before he returns to his classroom in Room 219 this fall to teach algebra.

Vehicle emission controls and cleaner-burning fuels have improved air quality in urban environments but children can still be exposed to particularly dangerous levels of air contamination in schools built near busy roadways or other sources of pollution. New research reported in the July 6, 2006 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine finds that the level of carbon particles in the air is correlated with reduced function in children's developing lungs.

A few years ago I attended a Forum for Youth Investment luncheon with policy analysts and funders -- all agreed the U.S. was behind the times because we lack any kind of national, coordinated youth policy. In March 2005 Connect for Kids and the Forum fielded a poll that asked if coordinating services for young people made sense--of course the answer was a resounding "yes."

A 2003 White House Task Force report found that programs working to meet the needs of young people are spread across 12 federal departments and agencies with little communication or coordination among them. Currently, there are federal funding streams designed to meet varying needs of youth – afterschool programs, job training, mental health, etc. – but they are administered in silos, independent of one another.

The Federal Youth Coordination Act (H.R. 856/S. 409) could change all that. FYCA would establish a very high-level national Federal Youth Development Council to enable the federal government to coordinate the existing resources of different federal agencies. FYCA has good support from Republicans and Democrats, but time is running out in this Congressional session.

The National Collaboration for Youth is collecting organization sign-ons to encourage the Senate to make the time to pass this legislation designed to improve our nation's response to the needs of older youth.

When it came to our health, my mother always crossed her fingers and kneeled at her bed at night, praying that my sister and I would not get sick. My mother, a single parent, didn’t have insurance—she couldn’t afford it, and like many folks, she lingered in limbo: she earned too much to qualify for Medicaid, but couldn’t afford private insurance.

For years, however, my mother did have insurance, but with a super tight budget that comes with raising two kids on your own and paying a house mortgage on your own, she made the untimely decision to drop our health care coverage. I say untimely because a few months after she dropped our coverage, my sister was misdiagnosed by a doctor for a nagging stomachache, and weeks later, my sister had to have her appendix taken out.

According to an article in the Waco Tribune-Herald, Texas leads the nation with the highest percentage of uninsured children, and the state is on the cusp of a strange trend—100,000 fewer kids enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program this year than in late 2005. Texas officials cannot attribute this staggering decline to anything—yet. If that’s not a head-scratcher, I don’t know what is.

And then there is Illinois Governor Ron Blagojevich’s highly lauded (prematurely) universal health insurance for kids that launched a little over a week ago. Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times article cast a hovering doubt about the health plan’s ability to deliver the goods while draining state resources and the plan’s level of ambiguity. One state representative questioned Blagojevich’s motives in designing the plan. Is this universal health care for kids part of a grander populist utopia or just a platform issue on the road to reelection?

I was a chubby kid. (I’m also a chubby mother because of a plus-40 pound weight gain during my pregnancy, but that’s a subject for another rant-worthy blog). My cousins called me chubby, my track coach called me chubby, and even my mom and grandfather called me chubby. Was I offended by this occasional term of endearment? Sure. I mean, would I call my daughter chubby if she was?

Would you tell your child he or she was chubby? What about “overweight” or “obese”? These are the underlying questions the Center for Disease Control and Prevention wants answered. Under a proposal being studied by a committee of the American Medical Association, the CDC and others, overweight children would get the same labels as adults. Right now, the CDC avoids calling overweight children “obese” no matter now fat they are. According to a recent AP article, the CDC calls kids who are overweight “at risk of overweight” and obese children are called “overweight."

Calling a child obese would stigmatize an already chubby kid with low self-esteem, some parents and doctors say. Those favoring a label change argue that the current terms encourage a serious denial of a problem affecting many youth. I agree. Our kids are getting fatter, folks—are we doing a disservice to them by not properly labeling them?

As we all know, weight is an especially touchy subjects to kids. In the same AP article, an Illinois teen who lost 60 pounds said calling a kid “obese” was mean. I understand the sentiment, but I don’t think doctors and/or parents who use euphemisms are doing the child any good. If the child is medically obese then that comes with a whole slew of health problems—the child should know how grave those problems are. A doctor telling a child he or she is obese would be a wake-up call. Of course, telling a child this should be accompanied by a heartfelt discussion on ways to lose weight and positive and encouraging comments that the child can accomplish this. To help with this discussion, Connect For Kids provides a comprehensive resource to help parents understand and take action on this issue.