How Facebook Helped Parents Win A War With Chicago Schools
Editor's Note: This is Part 2 of an interview with Laura Ramirez, an ally to the Chicago moms staging a sit-in to demand a library for their children. Part 1 was posted earlier today.
After a 44-day sit-in, national media coverage and hundreds of phone calls and letters sent from the community and beyond, a group of South Side Chicago moms may have finally reached an agreement with Chicago Public Schools. CPS head Ron Huberman has agreed to build a library inside their children's elementary school, and
Kids' Brains Can't Handle Homelessness
Homelessness can wreak havoc on the adult brain, causing mental disorders like depression and post traumatic stress disorder in addition to being caused by them. Imagine what going without stable shelter does to the developing minds of young children.
In fact, one in three homeless kids has a mental health problem that affects their functioning by age 8. Long before that, though, 75 percent of kids 4 and under have developmental delays while about 40 percent of them have emotional and/or behavioral problems. What school teachers think is a problem child might just be a child with problems, a child who is homeless.
Why? Take your pick of reasons: stress, depression, fear, hunger, sleep-deprivation, or a parent who's so
Cancer, Hyperactivity, and Allergies May Lurk in Trick-or-Treat Bags
"Candy's Dark Side" is a Change.org series that looks at the health, ethical, and environmental costs of producing Halloween treats. For more installments in this series, click here, here, and here.
This Halloween, kids will undoubtedly come home with treat-or-treat bags exploding with color. M&Ms, Skittles, Sweet Tarts, Pez, and Nerds are just of few of the many candies out there that boast brilliant hues as part of their identities. While Skittles wouldn't be where it is today without its "taste the rainbow" mantra, it turns out that that rainbow actually tastes pretty toxic.
Food corporations use several synthetic food dyes to make their candies turn shades of red, blue, yellow, and green. While the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fails to regulate the use of these artificial dyes, increasing evidence suggests that the synthetic