Steady Habits: Finding mental health solutions for CT kids
This last year, spent in a pandemic, has changed the lives of so many. But those changes might be felt most acutely by children. Their routines of family life, social life, and learning, were upended. We’ve heard about a “lost school year,” for kids, but what about just a “lost year?”
The problems weren’t just felt by those children with the most acute mental health disorders, but we know that for those children who are most at risk, supports weren’t always in place –
before Covid.
So, what are the solutions? This past Tuesday night, The Connecticut Mirror, the Gannett Newspapers of New England and the Solutions Journalism Network collaborated on an event called “Coping With Covid: Mental Health Solutions For Kids”
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Formerly Incarcerated People in West Virginia Find Community Support
After using similar services, Amber Bjornsson works as a peer employment support specialist, helping returning citizens find work in their community. “I use the knowledge and network I’ve acquired through my own experiences,” Bjornsson said.
Photo by Marcus Constantino / 100 Days in Appalachia
A network of government agencies and community service organizations have created a program to help formerly incarcerated people navigate life outside prison.
May 24, 2021
Amber Bjornsson says she had a “true heart change” while serving a two-year prison sentence for the years of fines and felonies she previously collected. Once her sentence was complete, Bjornsson moved into a recovery home.
Solutions Journalism adopts a solutions-oriented approach to journalism; telling rigorous, investigative, and compelling stories of responses to existing social problems so that they can be scaled up or replicated elsewhere. It differs from the traditional, often problem-focused journalism because it highlights what works, as opposed to what does not, and goes further to investigate why an intervention or solution to a social problem was able to bring change. Solutions-oriented journalism also looks at what could have been done differently to improve or solve similar problems in other places. It can be used as an effective tool to hold policymakers to account demonstrating how solutions have been found to social problems.
Newport Daily News
This story is being provided for free as part of a series on childcare during the COVID pandemic, powered by the Solutions Journalism Network and dedicated to delivering solution-oriented stories about problems our community is facing.
A pandemic within a pandemic. That’s what experts are calling it.
Subjected to screens in a year of mostly remote learning, children’s mental health has suffered.
Physically distanced from many of the supports and connections that define childhood and school in a year of unprecedented stressors, “the kids are not OK,” as Vermont Gov. Phill Scott said in February.
This story is being provided for free as part of a series on childcare during the COVID pandemic, powered by the Solutions Journalism Network and dedicated to delivering solution-oriented stories about problems our community is facing.
Parents and guardians were forced to become ad-hoc teachers when schools shut down last March, and for many, their algebra and geometry chops were rusty.
They weren t able to aid their kids math pursuits at home – fractions, decimals, linear equations – in the same way they could reading. It wasn t only due to a lack of remembrance from their own schooling days, but an overall discomfort with math in general that existed pre-pandemic.