Franklin Schargel’s Blog

Anti-bullying activities include STOMP Out Bullying„¢’s signature campaign Blue Shirt Day® World Day of Bullying Prevention„¢ on the first Monday of every October — this year on Monday, October 3rd. Watch for our public service announcements by featured celebrities!

Every October, schools and organizations across the country join together in observing National Bullying Prevention Month. The goal: encourage communities to work together to stop bullying and cyberbullying by increasing awareness of the prevalence and impact of bullying on all children of all ages.

The suicide rate among black children has nearly doubled since the early 1990s, while the rate for white children has declined, a new study has found, an unusual pattern that seemed to suggest something troubling was happening among some of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

Suicide among children ages 5 to 11, the age range the study measured, is rare, and researchers had to blend several years of data to get reliable results. The findings, which measured the period from 1993 to 2012, were so surprising that researchers waited for an additional year of data to check them. The trend did not change.

Suicide rates are almost always lower among blacks than among whites of any age. But the study, published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics (https://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2293169) found that the rate had risen so steeply among black children “” to 2.54 from 1.36 per one million children “” that it was substantially above the rate among white children by the end of the period. The rate for white children fell to 0.77 per million from 1.14.

It was the first time a national study found a higher suicide rate for blacks than for whites of any age group, researchers noted.

The researchers used national data based on death certificates that listed suicide as the underlying cause. In the study, they offered a few possible explanations for the difference, including that black children are more likely to be exposed to violence and traumatic stress, and that black children are more likely to experience an early onset of puberty, which can increase the risk of depression and impulsive aggression. But it was not clear whether those characteristics had changed much over the period of the study and would account for the sharp rise.

The rate for black boys rose sharply. The rate for black girls also rose, but the change was not statistically significant. The way the children were dying seemed to provide some clues. Gun deaths among white boys had gone down by about half while staying about the same for black boys, signaling that gun safety education may not be reaching black communities as effectively as white ones.

Suicides by hanging, on the other hand, roughly tripled among black boys, while remaining virtually unchanged for whites. https://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2293169

We have come to believe that all of us have access to the Internet. In New York, for example, children are still scrounging for a few bars of web access, dropped like crumbs from a table. The same is true in rural communities. With broadband costing on average $55 per month, 25 percent of all households and 50 percent of those making less than $20,000 lack this service at home.

All summer, kids have been hanging out in front of the Morris Park Library in the Bronx, before opening hours and after closing. Children sit outside of libraries and bring their computers to pick up the Wi-Fi signal that is leaking out of the building, because they can’t afford Internet access at home. They’re there during the school year, too, even during the winter “” it’s the only way they can complete their online math homework.

People line up, sometimes for hours, to use the library system’s free computers. Go into any library in the nation and you’ll most likely see the same thing. They come to do what so many of us take for granted: apply for government services, study or do research, do homework, talk with family or friends, inform themselves as voters, and just participate in our society and culture “” so much of which now takes place online. Our public libraries are charged with providing free access to information, and in recent years we have had to create new ways of doing that. Leaking broadband (frankly, accidentally) onto the branch stoops is not enough.

Yet we need help from more than libraries. No child can have equal access to education, or any worker equal access to a job, without access to the Internet and the digital training to use it skillfully. Our federal, state and local policies must recognize there can be no full equality without digital equality. We can also require the companies that reach millions of customers via city infrastructure to provide more affordable rates for low-income residents, and to ensure that broadband connections are provided to poor neighborhoods.

Research indicates that there is a direct correlation between poverty and dropping out of school. Shouldn’t our society provide access to the thing that so many of us take for granted ““ broadband access?

A Judge in Connecticut has declared the way that the State of Connecticut funds it it schools is irrational and unconstitutional. The mayor of Hartford is calling it one of the most significant Connecticut court decisions in decades.

Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawsher ruled Wednesday in an 11-year-old lawsuit that the state must overhaul its education system and come up with a new funding formula within 180 days to ensure the state’s poorest school districts have resources to provide an adequate education.

“The only reason for any of the court’s legal ruling is the fundamental right to an adequate educational opportunity,” the judge said. “Changes must come.”

The Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding filed its lawsuit in 2005, arguing that Connecticut’s current system results in more money for wealthy school districts, at the expense of poorer districts. The Supreme Court then sent the case to the Superior Court in 2010 for trial.

The state has said all public schools are adequately funded and there has been no evidence to show that spending more would lead to better test scores.

“We welcome the conversation this decision brings. We know that to improve outcomes for all Connecticut students and to close persistent achievement gaps, we need to challenge the status quo and take bold action,” Gov. Dannel Malloy said.

https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/Judge-Connecticut-Education-Funding-System-Unconstitutional-392616011.html?_osource=SocialFlowFB_CTBrand

I am indebted to my friend, Marie Sobers for alerting me to this.

The New York Times published an article, written by Brian X. Chen on JULy 20th, 2016 asking this question. I suggest that you give this to your parents and have a discussion at a Parents Meeting.

The smartphone, after all, is the key to unfettered access to the internet and the many benefits and dangers that come with it. But unlike driving a car, which is legal in some states starting at the age of 16, there is no legal guideline for a parent to determine when a child may be ready for a smartphone.

The topic is being increasingly debated as children get smartphones at an ever younger age. On average, children are getting their first smartphones around age 10, according to the research firm Influence Central down from age 12 in 2012. For some children, smartphone ownership starts even sooner “” including second graders as young as 7, according to internet safety experts.

James P. Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization that reviews content and products for families, has a strict rule for his family: His children get a smartphone only when they start high school “” after they have learned restraint and the value of face-to-face communication. “No two kids are the same, and there’s no magic number,” he said. “A kid’s age is not as important as his or her own responsibility or maturity level.”

So how do parents determine, when?  The longer you wait to give your children a smartphone, the better. Some experts said 12 was the ideal age, while others said 14. All agreed later was safer because smartphones can be addictive distractions that detract from schoolwork while exposing children to issues like online bullies, child predators or sexting.

The Research

Ms. Weinberger, who wrote the smartphone and internet safety book “The Boogeyman Exists: And He’s in Your Child’s Back Pocket,” said she had surveyed 70,000 children in the last 18 months and found that, on average, sexting began in the fifth grade, pornography consumption began when children turned 8, and pornography addiction began around age 11.

In a separate study published this year, Common Sense Media polled 1,240 parents and children and found 50 percent of the children admitted that they were addicted to their smartphones. It also found that 66 percent of parents felt their children used mobile devices too much, and 52 percent of children agreed. About 36 percent of parents said they argued with their children daily about device use.

Pros and Cons

Smartphones undoubtedly bring benefits. With the devices, children gain access to powerful apps, including education tools for studying, chat apps for connecting with friends and the wealth of information on the web.

But they also are one step closer to distracting games, sexting apps and social media apps where online bullies are on the prowl. Even older children are not immune: Last year, at least 100 students at a Colorado high school were embroiled in a scandal that involved trading naked pictures of themselves on their mobile devices.

Parents will determine when their child truly needs a smartphone. When that time comes, there are approaches for testing the waters before handing one to the child. One popular option is to start the child off with dumbed-down mobile devices,like feature phones that can only send text messages or place phone calls, and to assess whether they can use those devices responsibly.

Parents might sign a contract with their  child stating what the consequences are for breaking the rules, and the child must sign the contract before receiving a smartphone.

The easiest way to limit child use is to take away the cellphone at night. Nighttime is for doing homework, reading, watching television, or sleeping – not for texting.

There are some phone settings that can help keep children safe when they do get smartphones.

For iPhones, Apple offers a switchboard full of features that parents can enable or disable, including the ability to restrict the Safari browser from gaining access to adult content and the ability to prevent apps from using cellular data. The iPhone’s parental controls  live inside the Settings app in a menu labeled Restrictions.

Android phones lack similar built-in parental control settings, though there are many apps in the Google Play app store that let parents add restrictions. One app Qustodio, which lets parents monitor their children’s text messages, disable apps at certain times of day or even shut off a smartphone remotely.

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Doctors are aware that their first responsibility is “to do no harm”. In other words, they should help their patients.  Obviously that message has not been received by mayors, other politicians and some educational reformers. They would rather close low performing schools rather than working to improve them. The schools they choose to close are those which do not perform as well as schools in affluent neighborhoods which are better funded.

Neighborhood schools are the “glue” which hold communities together,  They bring together parents and children.  Some bring services like dentists, mental health professionals and doctors to children and their parents rather than have these people go to dentist’s offices who they may not have the money to pay for these services.

By closing local schools this puts an additional burden on students and their parents. Children are put on buses to leave their neighborhood to travel as much as two hours in each direction. So if the school day begins at 8AM, children need to board their bus at 6AM while needing to get up at 4 or 5AM. It also puts increasing pressure on the receiving schools to find teachers and classrooms to address these new incoming students.

It would appear logical that the increased costs of busing could be used to improve schools.  Maybe the politicians will get the message.

September is National Suicide Prevention Month. According to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suicide is the third leading cause of teenage death. As defined by the CDC, suicide (i.e., taking one’s own life) is a serious public health problem that affects even young people. For youth between the ages of 10 and 24, suicide is the third leading cause of death. It results in approximately 4600 lives lost each year. The top three methods used in suicides of young people include firearm (45%), suffocation (40%), and poisoning (8%).

Deaths from youth suicide are only part of the problem. More young people survive suicide attempts than actually die. A nationwide survey of youth in grades 9″“12 in public and private schools in the United States (U.S.) found that 16% of students reported seriously considering suicide, 13% reported creating a plan, and 8% reporting trying to take their own life in the 12 months preceding the survey. Each year, approximately 157,000 youth between the ages of 10 and 24 receive medical care for self-inflicted injuries at Emergency Departments across the U.S.

Suicide affects all youth, but some groups are at higher risk than others. Boys are more likely than girls to die from suicide. Of the reported suicides in the 10 to 24 age group, 81% of the deaths were males and 19% were females. Girls, however, are more likely to report attempting suicide than boys. Cultural variations in suicide rates also exist, with Native American/Alaskan Native youth having the highest rates of suicide-related fatalities. A nationwide survey of youth in grades 9″“12 in public and private schools in the U.S. found Hispanic youth were more likely to report attempting suicide than their black and white, non-Hispanic peers.

Several factors can put a young person at risk for suicide. However, having these risk factors does not always mean that suicide will occur.

• History of previous suicide attempts
• Family history of suicide
• History of depression or other mental illness
• Alcohol or drug abuse
• Stressful life event or loss
• Easy access to lethal methods
• Exposure to the suicidal behavior of others
• Incarceration

Most people are uncomfortable with the topic of suicide. Too often, victims are blamed, and their families and friends are left stigmatized. As a result, people do not communicate openly about suicide. Thus an important public health problem is left shrouded in secrecy, which limits the amount of information available to those working to prevent suicide.