Category: Alliance for Positive Youth Development

Improving Student Behavior Through Engagement

Have you ever been in a long meeting, training, or school lecture, and found yourself falling asleep, or having your mind wander? If so, this most likely happens because the event is boring, and there is a disengagement between you and what is being presented. Similarly, students can find their classrooms boring and feel unmotivated …

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Breaking the Bonds: Moving Away from Zero-Tolerance Policies

Many of us probably grew up witnessing classmates being sent to detention, and some of us might even have feared being sent ourselves. Although our fear of detention was mostly due to the fear of getting in trouble with our parents, we were also aware that detention was a few steps away from being expelled …

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Best Practices For Grief: Death and Divorce

Previously, this series explored the grief experiences of children and teens impacted by parental deployment.  This series continues with the focus shifting to the impacts of death and divorce on youth today.   Below is the third video in our video series highlighting best practices for educators, teachers, and other key players in the lives …

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Best Practices for Grief – Parental Deployment

This series began with an introduction of multiple grief experiences of youth in foster care placement.  This series continues with a look at parental deployment and its impact on youth. Multiple relocations.  Loss of friendships.  Loss of pets.  Parental deployment.  Death.  These are a few of the many grief experiences military children and teens in …

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It’s Grief To Me – Death, Divorce, Incarceration, Deployment and Foster Care

When I graduated from high school, I never intended on going back. Then 13 years later, I found myself walking the halls of someone else’s high school thinking about that period of my own life that was so fraught with darkness. But this time my role was different. I was different. I was a mental …

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The Everyday Fears of an Ordinary Woman

I don’t want to live like this. I don’t want to live in fear. I don’t want to live in fear of every person who comes to the door. The plumber, the electrician, the cable guy. The mailman, the FedEx driver who comes to drop off a package on the front steps. The new neighbor …

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Turf Wars

You’ve probably heard about it. Then again, maybe not. Despite the fact that the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team has won three straight Olympic gold medals, and was runner-up in the 2011 World Cup, women’s soccer is still struggling to receive the attention and respect it deserves in both the mainstream U.S. sports media and …

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My Fight for the Preservation of the Cookie Jar

My mom and I have had an ongoing debate for oh… approximately twenty years or so. About what exactly, you might be asking yourself? Nutrition. Childhood nutrition, to be exact. Our debate mainly rests on the question – when it comes to childhood nutrition, is restriction really the best way to go? Let me set …

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Education Equality? The Color of School Closings

No more pencils. No more books. No more teacher’s dirty looks. A favorite song of mine, which I would often sing to myself every time June rolled around. The tune would play over and over in my head, as I would count down to the last day of school in a rush of projects, parties, …

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The Homelessness Series: What About the Kids?

According to a report conducted by the Coalition of the Homeless last month, a record high 50,000 people slept in New York City’s shelters this January. Fifty-thousand people. More people are now homeless in New York City than at any time since the Great Depression. Want to know an even scarier fact? Almost half of …

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