Trauma-Sensitive Schools

Cheryl Sharp, MSW, MWT, Karen Johnson, MSW, LCSW, and Pamela Black from the National Council on Behavioral Health present an excellent overview of on Trauma-Sensitive Schools, including the following seven domains:

Domain 1 Student Assessment

Domain 2 Student and Family Involvement

Domain 3 Trauma Sensitive Educated and Responsive District and School Staff

Domain 4 Trauma-Informed, Evidence Based and Emerging Best Practices

Domain 5 Safe and Secure Environments

Domain 6 Community Outreach and Partnership Building

Domain 7 Ongoing Performance Improvement

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ReportRutgers CLiMEPoverty, Trauma
Oakland’s Displacement Crisis: As Told by the Numbers

Oakland stands at the center of a perfect storm. The city and surrounding Bay Area region are experiencing extraordinary economic growth, but housing production is not keeping pace with the escalated demands, nor is sufficient housing affordable to many existing residents and the expanding lower-income workforce. The current displacement crisis undermines the health and well being of its residents, and threatens the historic diversity that gives Oakland its strength and vitality.

The red-hot Bay Area economy is feeding a displacement crisis. Nearly 150,000 new jobs are expected to be added to the East Bay economy by 2020, but housing production is not keeping pace with escalating demands, nor is sufficient housing affordable to many existing residents and the expanding lower-income workforce. According to A Roadmap Towards Equity: Housing Solutions for Oakland, CA, the majority of current Oakland residents could not afford to rent or purchase homes at the current prices in their neighborhoods.1 This has strong implications for Oakland families who lose their housing due to eviction, foreclosure, or other events. The housing crisis imperils seniors on fixed incomes, artists, students, low-wage workers (there is no market level apartment listing affordable for a worker earning Oakland’s minimum wage of $12.55/hour), and even teachers, nurses, and first responders.

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ReportRutgers CLiMEHousing
The Economics Of Inclusionary Development

Whereas many U.S. cities have experienced a post-recession economic revival, the accompanying run-up in housing costs is threatening to undermine this success by pricing workers out of cities, lengthening commutes, and diminishing livability, the report notes. As a result, local officials are turning to inclusionary zoning (IZ) as a way to combat the shortage of housing that is affordable to moderate- and lower-income workers.

IZ policies take a market-based approach to affordable housing development by requiring or incentivizing the creation of below-market-rate units in exchange for approval of a market-rate project. Inclusionary zoning leverages private development to achieve a public benefit.

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ReportRutgers CLiMEHousing, Inequality
New Data Highlights Vast and Persistent Racial Inequities in Who Experiences Poverty in America

Already the majority of children under five years old in the United States are children of color. By the end of this decade, the majority of people under 18 years old will be of color, and by 2044, our nation will be majority people of color. This growing diversity is an asset, but only if everyone is able to access the opportunities they need to thrive. Poverty is a tremendous barrier to economic and social inclusion and new data added to the National Equity Atlas highlights the vast and persistent racial inequities in who experiences poverty in America.

On June 28, we added a poverty indicator to the Atlas, including breakdowns at three thresholds: 100 percent, 150 percent, and 200 percent of the federal poverty line. We also added an age breakdown to the new poverty indicator, in response to user requests for child poverty data, which allows you to look at poverty rates across different age groups including the population under 5 and 18 years old as well as those 18 to 24, 25 to 64, and 65 and over.

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ReportRutgers CLiMERace, Inequality, Poverty
How Kids Learn Resilience

In 2013, for the first time, a majority of public-school students in this country—51 percent, to be precise—fell below the federal government’s low-income cutoff, meaning they were eligible for a free or subsidized school lunch. It was a powerful symbolic moment—an inescapable reminder that the challenge of teaching low-income children has become the central issue in American education.

The truth, as many American teachers know firsthand, is that low-income children can be harder to educate than children from more-comfortable backgrounds. Educators often struggle to motivate them, to calm them down, to connect with them. This doesn’t mean they’re impossible to teach, of course; plenty of kids who grow up in poverty are thriving in the classroom. But two decades of national attention have done little or nothing to close the achievement gap between poor students and their better-off peers.

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ArticleRutgers CLiMETrauma
APN Statewide Poverty Report: History Of Poverty Chapter

There are as many ways to think about what poverty is as there are to chronicle its historical roots. For many of the 47 million Americans currently living with incomes below the federal poverty line, being poor is working poverty—they manage low-wage, often contingent work, or see their incomes fall temporarily below the official line while struggling through a career transition, a divorce or a serious illness. For every poor person or family, poverty represents a deprivation of key resources that is accompanied by a loss of power over how to reclaim them. For persistently poor …

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ReportGuest UserPoverty
The Rich Live Longer Everywhere. For The Poor, Geography Matters

For poor Americans, the place they call home can be a matter of life or death.

The poor in some cities — big ones like New York and Los Angeles, and also quite a few smaller ones like Birmingham, Ala. — live nearly as long as their middle-class neighbors or have seen rising life expectancy in the 21st century. But in some other parts of the country, adults with the lowest incomes die on average as young as people in much poorer nations like Rwanda, and their life spans are getting shorter.

In those differences, documented in sweeping new research, lies an optimistic message: The right mix of steps to improve habits and public health could help people live longer, regardless of how much money they make.

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ReportRutgers CLiMEPoverty, Housing, Inequality
Understanding Institutional Obligations To Children Experiencing Trauma II: New Jersey State Law On School-Based Responsibilities

This memo is the second in a series of documents prepared as part of the Center on Law, Inequality & Metropolitan Equity's (CLiME) Trauma, Schools, and Poverty project. The classroom, as the centerpiece of a child’s daily life, is one place where theneeds of childhood trauma victims can be both collectively and individually addressed. CLiME does not assume that existing special education or antidiscrimination law in schools is the optimal means for protecting or supporting victims of childhood trauma; however, we commence this research by investigating whether schools …

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MemorandumGuest UserTrauma
Understanding Institutional Obligations to Children Experiencing Trauma I: Three Federal Laws on School-Based Responsibilities

This memo is the first in a series of documents prepared as part of the Center on Law, Inequality & Metropolitan Equity's (CLiME) Trauma, Schools, and Poverty project. At this stage in the research, CLiME does not propose that existing special education and antidiscrimination law are the optimal means for providing legal protection to victims of childhood trauma. Rather, we asked whether there currently exists a public duty to provide supportive services to traumatized children. This point of entry led our research to the school system, which holds a central presence in the …

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ReportGuest UserTrauma
U.S. Concentrated Poverty In The Wake Of The Great Recession

The Great Recession may have ended in 2009, but despite the subsequent jobs rebound and declining unemployment rate, the number of people living below the federal poverty line in the United States remains stuck at recession-era record levels.

The rapid growth of the nation’s poor population during the 2000s also coincided with significant shifts in the geography of American poverty. Poverty spread beyond its historic urban and rural locales, rising rapidly in smaller metropolitan areas and making the nation’s suburbs home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country. Yet, even as poverty spread to touch more people and places, it became more concentrated in distressed and disadvantaged areas.

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ReportRutgers CLiMEPoverty, Race
How Equal are New Jersey’s Towns and Cities?

"In this post we will explore the degree of income inequality seen in New Jersey’s municipalities. Using the same process as in our previous analysis where we explored the Gini Index and 80/20 Household Income Ratio of US counties, here we can get a more granular view of inequality seen within our counties.

Using the interactive map and table feature below, we can see the Gini Index, the 80/20 Household Income Ratio, and the income limits for the 20% and 80% cutpoints for every New Jersey municipality. This information, along with margins of error are displayed when hovering over or clicking a municipality on the maps. Options for filtering the maps and table are found on the right-hand side of the feature."

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ReportRutgers CLiMEInequality, Housing
Attitudes Toward Exploited Cities Helped Poison Flint

"Flint is one of the extreme examples of how our country has allowed geographic divisions by race and income to result in reverse–Robin Hood exploitation of those with the least power.

We’ve used free trade agreements, race-to-the-bottom economic development poaching, and inconsistent union rules to allow corporations to make a fortune off of cities like Flint and then pack up and leave for cheaper workers.

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ArticleRutgers CLiMEInequality, Race
De-Exoticizing Ghetto Poverty: On the Ethics of Representation in Urban Ethnography

INTRO: To write an ethnography about poor urban people is to risk courting controversy. While all ethnographers face questions about how well they knew their site or how much their stories can be trusted, the tone and content of those questions typically remain within the bounds of collegial discourse. Ethnographers of poor minorities have incited distinct passion and at times acrimony, inspiring accusations of stereotyping, misrepresentation, sensationalism, and even cashing in on the problems of the poor (Fischer 2014; see Boelen 1992; Reed 1994; Wacquant 2002; Jones 2010; Betts 2014; Rios 2015).

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PaperRutgers CLiMEPoverty, Inequality, Race
Housing Policy Levers to Promote Economic Mobility

ABSTRACT: Housing policy can play an important role in improving or impeding the economic well-being of low-income households. Through this paper, we aim to better equip researchers, policymakers, and practitioners for conversations about the links between housing policy and economic mobility. The first half of this paper clarifies common definitions and measurements of inequality and mobility. Adopting the lens of economic mobility for examining how housing policies can address challenges of inequality in society today, the second half of the paper looks at five categories of housing policy levers that affect economic mobility: tax policy, block grants, rental assistance, fair housing, and homeownership programs.

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ReportRutgers CLiMEHousing, Inequality
ALICE New Jersey: Study of Financial Hardship

"According to the latest United Way of Northern New Jersey ALICE Report, 1.2 million households in New Jersey are unable to afford the state’s high cost of living. That number includes those living in poverty and the population called ALICE, which stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained,Employed.

The ALICE study provides county-by-county and town-level data; cost of living calculations for six family size variations; analysis of how many households are living paycheck to paycheck; and the implications for New Jersey’s future economic stability."

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ReportRutgers CLiMEInequality, Poverty
Defying the Greater Government: Local and State Governments’ Innovative Approach to Policymaking

Since the economic collapse of 2008, American citizens have grown increasingly skeptical oftheir government’s ability to pass socially and economically beneficial legislation. As citizens criticize large-scale government entities, such as the federal government or state legislatures, lower-level politicians have attempted to keep the masses at bay by passing legislation that will appease the voters in their districts. However, much of this newfound legislation is at odds with the policymaking efforts of their superior levels of government. In particular, over the last three years …

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ReportGuest User
Architecture of Segregation: Civil Unrest, the Concentration of Poverty, and Public Policy

Over the past year, scenes of civil unrest have played out in the deteriorating inner-ring suburb of Ferguson and the traditional urban ghetto of inner-city Baltimore. The proximate cause of these conflicts has been brutal interactions between police and unarmed black men, leading to protests that include violent confrontations with police, but no single incident can explain the full extent of the protesters’ rage and frustration. The riots and protests—which have occurred in racially-segregated, high-poverty neighborhoods, bringing back images of the “long, hot summers” of the 1960s—have sparked a national conversation about race, violence, and policing that is long overdue.

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ReportRutgers CLiMEPoverty, Race, Housing, Inequality