The Kearns model: Helping youths by teaching parents

Since the 1960s, New York City has run the nation’s largest publicly managed summer jobs program. Nearly 50,000 14- to 24-four-year-olds spend six weeks working, not only in publicly funded day care centers, summer camps, hospitals and city agencies, but also high-tech firms and Fortune 500 companies. The summer jobs help at-risk kids keep from dropping out of school.

The anti-violence program at a YMCA in Chicago has war veterans mentoring young gang members as a treatment for the mental and physical wounds of violence. The gang members have healthy role models and the veterans a new sense of purpose.

Arts education programs in the United States are subjected to cutting for maintaining tight school budgets. Technology sectors in Seattle seek professionals who have been trained in problem solving skills and innovative idea generation. In response, Seattle Public Schools and the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture collaborate to promote equity in students’ access to the arts.

How is the small town of Springdale, Arkansas handling a growing influx of students from the Marshall Islands? Schools are organizing home visits and building parent communities through after-school Micronesian basketball leagues, English language courses for parents, and more.

For the past four years, several rural Colorado school districts have experimented with alternative forms of evaluation that don't rely solely on the results of educational testing. Now, a proposed bill, with wide support, would provide financial and logistical support to these pilots.

JamieSue Goodman, an employee at Google, was part of the team that developed an Applied Digital Skills curriculum that teaches students how to use technology to accomplish real-world tasks. Available for educators worldwide, 360,000 students have used the materials since its launch and 50,000 teachers have registered on the site. Students and teachers alike attest to how fun, engaging, and useful the education is.

New Mexico has been fighting the rise of the opioid epidemic for decades, so when medical professionals noticed an increase in opioid-dependent mothers giving birth, one doctor started a new program to address this. This program uses both medication-assisted substance abuse treatment and behavioral therapy, and has resulted in a decrease in overdose deaths.

A town in West Virginia was lacking resources for mental health care, so high school juniors were tapped to fill the need. Learning skills such as how to use naloxone to in an overdose situation to asking open-ended questions to intervene in a crisis, the students walked away from a “life & recovery coach academy” equipped with usable skills, college credits, and a certificate, while also reentering their community as more engaged citizens.

As schools across the United States weigh the pros and cons of sticking to remote learning, welcoming students back into the classroom, or a hybrid, there are lessons to learn from schools around the world. In China and France, teachers have gotten creative by having students wear wings that help them remember proper social distance, and other teachers have decorated the playground with smiley faces to indicate where students should stand. Other schools in Denmark and Finland reintroduced students to class by age, since data has supported that children under 10 are less likely to transmit the virus.

In the 1930s, about one million Mexican and Mexican-Americans, who were born in the U.S., were forcibly removed from the U.S. under the presidency of Herbert Hoover. Its called the “Mexican Repatriation.” A class in Bell Gardens elementary learned about it almost by accident. They wanted a formal federal apology and applied to the California “ought to be a law” contest. They testified in front of the California assembly. The governor of California signed a law that encourages courses in history books to include the Mexican repatriation.