Many children served in afterschool programs would be left alone in dangerous neighborhoods, potentially engaging in risky sexual and criminal behaviors, if not for their participation in structured programming. In fact, research has shown that students who spend the majority of their afterschool hours in unsupervised activities are more likely to…

"Data Trends" reports present summaries of research on mental health services for children and adolescents and their families. The article summarized in this "Data Trends" presents the results of a study of 40,636 children entering the Illinois domestic violence service system over a five-year period. The results of this study…

Recent reports have documented how some parents choose to place their children in the child welfare or juvenile justice systems in order to obtain the mental health services that their children need. Senators Susan Collins and Joseph Lieberman of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs asked the General Accounting Office (GAO) to testify on:…

Challenge initiatives are used by many mental health agencies to facilitate a variety of therapeutic changes within participants. There are several ways to lead these challenge initiatives, including whole training, fixed training, and adaptive training. This paper presents a theoretical basis for considering adaptive training to be the most…

This study uses a historical perspective to examine the interface of the Maryland Juvenile Justice Department and the Mental Hygiene Administration in their efforts to provide services to youth involved with the juvenile justice system who were found to have mental disorders. A time line was constructed documenting developments from the 16th…

This article highlights the untended mental health needs of children across the United States. Citing troubling mental health statistics, the author suggests creating a community culture that does not stigmatize or ignore mental health problems, specifically by making prevention and treatment the rule. One of the potential stumbling blocks…

This study provides comparative data describing the quality of 1,175 psychological sites currently available on the Internet. A rating scale was used to assess six dimensions of site quality including accuracy, practicality, normalization and sense of belonging, referral, and feedback mechanisms. One-way ANOVA on the six separate quality items and…

This bulletin is intended to raise awareness of the magnitude and gravity of adolescent maltreatment and to provide information on public health program and policy interventions. A review of adolescent victimization, with a focus on vulnerable youth, provides background for the development of public health measures to promote prevention and ensure…

Immunization data are collected annually from Illinois public and nonpublic schools. This report is a compilation of the data on the immunization status of school-age children in Illinois for the school year 1998-99. The compliance level for all Illinois students is 97.25 percent. The data by specific disease category, based on the percent of…

This policy brief is the fifth of a series of analyses of Head Start Program Information Report (PIR) data by CLASP (Center for Law and Social Policy). It describes the picture for Head Start and Early Head Start children, families, and programs in the 2002-2003 program year. In this brief, "Head Start" refers to all Head Start programs, including…

Emphasizes that from a practical point of view, it is important that studies with malnourished children emphasize the interactions between nutrition and environment rather than attempt complex, costly experiments which hopefully will assess the contribution of each of the components alone. (Author/JM)

Analytic labor force participation models which exclude information on worker health care lack explanatory power. If costs of disability can be separated through better information into costs reducible through delivery of health care, and costs more appropriately dealt with through labor market policies, the models will be improved. (KP)

Mentally retarded citizens have been denied their human and civil rights, not only by the public, but by professionals--including social workers. The author claims that most programs for the mentally retarded are, at best, dehumanizing. Professionals have an ethical obligation to refuse to refer children to such programs. (Author)

The nation has the capacity, capability, and resources to abolish poverty before the end of the next decade. (DM)