It’s a perennial struggle for military families, but one that is hitting home for more and more of them as soldiers rotate back to the home front from Iraq and Afghanistan: the sometimes painful adjustments that come with the return of a long-absent parent. Rebecca Freshour looks at some of the issues.

For ten teenagers from rural Mississippi, a summer in and around the corridors of power of Washington, D.C. provided life lessons, and new friendships. Read about their experiences in this story from What Kids
Can Do.

The mission of the Children's Defense Fund is to Leave No Child Behind, and to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start, and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities in Mississippi.

The Mississippi Forum on Children and Families provides community resource development through information, education, and training. The Forum is using education, research, and demonstration in the areas of early childhood education and care, child health, youth development, employment preparation and family support. The Forum has four primary objectives:

Establishment of quality programs
Distribution of information

Based on the averaged freshman graduation rate, a new measure the U.S. Dept. of Education is using to assess more accurately and comprehensively how many students are graduating from high school, 11 states drastically overestimate the number of students who graduate from their high schools. The biggest offenders include North Carolina, New Mexico, Mississippi, Indiana and South Dakota, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education summary. New Jersey, North Dakota and Wisconsin graduated the highest percentages of their high school students on time, while Washington, DC, South Carolina and Georgia had the lowest graduation rates.

What's happening to children in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems in Louisiana and Mississippi? The two are already among the nation's poorest states, and the recent chaos has disrupted or destroyed facilities, group homes, and foster care arrangements. Children in the juvenile justice system are more likely to get stuck in facilities far from home and the systems themselves are vulnerable. The Annie E. Casey Foundation, which has long targeted reform efforts in these areas, has the story.

Children are especially vulnerable to environmental hazards, and that means care should be taken in returning them to areas that have been flooded by the recent hurricanes, says the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). While many advocates urge youth involvement in middle- and longer-term rebuilding efforts, the AAP cautions against the involvement of kids and teens involved in clean-up activities.

Many of the most vulnerable residents of the states hit by Hurricane Katrina were poor children and were disproportionately African American. The National Center for Children in Poverty has an analysis.