Dehydration. Fatigue. Poor classroom performance. Water can help solve these issues for kids, but Latino kids don’t have access to clean drinking water as often as white kids, and they are more dehydrated. That’s why Salud America! created the #SaludWater health campaign! #SaludWater promotes awareness and grassroots actions to inspire local change to give Latino children more access to drinking water: Share social media messages about real stats and real people driving innovative solutions to boost water access, such as adding water bottle fountains in schools, pushing water using bilingual promotoras, and more.
Sign a letter to urge State PTAs to prioritize access to drinking water in schools, such as water bottle fountains.
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More Latinos are heading to college than ever before. The bad news is that the high cost of higher education often stands in the way of Latinos completing their college degrees. In fact, many students have to choose between tuition or food and housing. For example, 31% of Latino students are hungry, according to a study. A staggering 14% of students at 70 community colleges in 24 states were homeless, according to a survey by the HOPE Lab at the University of Wisconsin. Also 32,000 college applicants were in 2015-2016 identified as “unaccompanied homeless youth” on federal student aid forms, according to The New York Times. Los Angeles (49% Latino population) is a microcosm of college hunger+homelessness. Homeless & Hungry Currently, one in five of 230,000 ...
Education is one of the key social determinants of health. It has been tied to a person’s overall health, long-term financial well-being, and job attainment. Latinos have made great strides in education in recent years, with high-school dropout rates at an all-time low and enrollment in colleges and universities at all-time highs. However, for many Latino families, one barrier that keeps them from obtaining quality education is simply a lack of knowledge of the overall system. In Memphis, TN (6.69% Latino population), a group of parents banded together to help Latino families in keep up with the city’s fast-changing education landscape. They created Spanish-speaking classes as part of the Memphis Lift’s Public Advocate Fellowship. “Our mission is to make the powerless ...
Latinos report the highest levels of stress among groups, due to money, employment, and family and health issues, according to the recent American Psychological Association (APA) annual Stress in America survey. When it comes to stress and mental health, Latinos often go untreated or undiagnosed. Persistent stress in young children can become toxic, according to new research from the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress. This toxic stress has been shown to cause “brain changes” that can interfere with learning and lead to more problems in adulthood. The research was unable to pinpoint exactly how many children have been harmed to date by toxic stress, but the data showed that many live in circumstances that experts say “put them at risk.” Other findings ...
Bullying can stress a Latino child's emotions and mental health, and can contribute to high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity and diabetes. That's bad enough. But bullying also can keep a child from attending school and impact the finances of school districts across the country, according to a new study by UT Austin, Medline reports. About 10% of kids in California (38.39% Latino population) missed at least one day of school in a month because they felt "unsafe" due to bullying, according to the study. That's about 301,000 kids missing school. And California schools—which get funding based on student attendance instead of total enrollment like in many other states—lose in excess of $275 million in funding each year when these bullied kids stay home. “Bullying ...
As long as there have been movies, characters have smoked on the big screen, too. But as the public became more aware of the consequences of using tobacco, attitudes changed and usage of tobacco products in films dwindled. Until recently. The amount of U.S. movies showing tobacco use jumped 80% in 2016 compared to films in 2015, according to a new CDC report from the Thumbs Up! Thumbs Down! project, which has tracked tobacco usage in movies since 1991, CNN reports. Nearly half of 2016's top-grossing movies showed people using tobacco, which could boost youth smoking rates among youth, particularly Latinos. Lights, Camera, Smoke? The new report examined top-grossing films from 1991 to 2016 on their use of cigarettes, cigars, pipes, hookahs, smokeless tobacco, and ...
The classic bully takes a kid's lunch money. But a new type of bully—"school lunch shaming," when a student has no money for lunch to begin with—is on the upswing in schools across the country, CNN reports. This type of "hidden" or "unintentional" bullying greatly affects Latino kids. Latino kids comprise about 1 in 4 of the kids participating in the National School Lunch Program, according to the UnidosUS. "It's the working poor who get screwed," Jill Duban, who heads up a program called Common Threads a school district that helps low-income and homeless families, told CNN. "The lunch ladies are not always nice about it."
Brown bags of shame
Despite the large expansion of free and reduced lunch programs across the country, many kids simply cannot afford to pay $2.35 for ...
Latinos have made great strides in education in recent years, with more enrolling two- and four-year colleges and universities than ever before. Despite these gains, there is still a significant gap between Latinos and other racial and ethnic minorities in obtaining college degrees. Many universities around the country are coming up with new and innovative approaches to not only increase the enrollment of Latino students, but to also help them succeed when they get on campus. In all, 492 campuses in 19 states and Puerto Rico have been designated Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), which allows them to apply for about $100 million annually in federal research grants. For the University of California – Irvine campus, these strategies have begun to pay off. The Irvine (10.05% ...
A simple assignment has the power to sharply increase Latino middle-schoolers' chances of getting to college, researchers have found. The assignment? Write essays about your core values and why they are important to you. For the past few years, Stanford University-led researchers followed 81 Latino, 158 black, and control students in middle schools who wrote these types of essays—which can provide "self-affirmation," reinforce adequacy, and add resilience, John Timmer reports in Ars Tecnica. Researchers then compared these essay writers to other students who wrote on neutral topics, like their afternoon routine. For Latinos, the self-affirmation essay writers cut their risk in half of ending up on the remedial track, and they were more than twice as likely to end up ...
