A person's high school years have always been said to be the best of their lives. Not only is it supposed to be a time of meeting and befriending new people who are different, but most importantly, it is the point in life in which you take the first step in setting the foundation for the future to come (the next step being college). Not only are they supposed to be the best, but they are supposed to be the most important as well. However, it must be realized that in order for someone's high school years to be successful, there needs to be a lot of support given to every single person or they will not succeed. I feel that the high schools in the United States do not give the social needs, interests, or academic needs of today's student's the support they need.

Over the past seven years, a handful of schools in Fairfax County, Virginia have served as test cases for modified school year calendars. What are the pros and cons for teachers, students and parents? Rob Capriccioso reports.

The number of children with a parent behind bars has soared to over 2 million in recent years. A small but growing number of programs are addressing the problem of how to keep parent-child relationships alive through the years of incarceration. Chris Dickon reports on one, the Messages Project in Virginia.

Remember your first trip to the top of a really tall playground slide? Remember the kid who got to the top of ladder, but couldn't get up the nerve to slide—or climb back down? Modern safety concerns have made this particular rite of passage rare, and raise the question, does a safe playground have to be boring? By Rob Capriccioso.

The Federation of Families for Children's Mental Health is a national family-run organization dedicated exclusively to helping children with mental health needs and their families achieve a better quality of life by:

Providing leadership to develop and sustain a nationwide network of family-run organizations.

Focusing the passion and cultural diversity of our membership to be a potent force for changing how systems respond to children with mental health needs and their families.

Driven by its mission that all children from birth to six in Greater Richmond and Petersburg will be healthy, well-cared for and ready to succeed in school, Success By 6 is focused on improving the quality and accessibility of early care and education for all children both within the home and out of the home. Together with our partners we are:

--leading an effective coalition of early childhood programs committed to developing a system for early child development services for all families;

Concept 1 Academies provides independent living skills, workforce development skills training and computer/academic skills training in a residential setting to prepare older foster care teens for successful transition into independence. Preparing tomorrow's leaders, today!

NRCA Head Start's mission is to maximize the strengths of families, their total health and well-being, and the social skills of children.

An analysis of government spending in the late 1990s shows that despite an economic boom and rising state spending, few public funds reached children in need in five economically distressed cities: Baltimore, Detroit, Oakland, Philadelphia, and Richmond. In these areas, state per capita expenditures rose 12 percent -- but spending by all levels of government for services to children rose only an average 2 percent per child.