Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/johns-hopkins/)
The backstories of Sakran and Pep couldn’t be more different. But their survivor stories drive their activism about the public health threat that gun violence poses and prove what some of the most alarming news headlines increasingly suggest: Almost anybody, almost anywhere, is a potential victim of gun violence.
More freshmen teens in Georgia and other southern states are going on to graduate, which has helped improve the national dropout average. The number of “dropout factories” – high schools where less than 60 percent of freshman actually graduate – went down from 2,007 to 1,746 between 2002 and 2008, according to a Johns Hopkins report out today called Building a Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Ending the High School Dropout Epidemic. Here’s the picture in Georgia. In 2002, 156 high schools were considered dropout factories. Things improved in 2008 with the number dropping to 120 schools.
Interest in the hallucinogenic drug salvia exploded this weekend when a video of teen pop sensation Miley Cyrus using salvia hit the Internet Friday. Salvia divinorum is a member of the sage family and users smoke it like a cigarette, chew it, or smoke it in a pipe or bong. It’s legal for adults in the state of California, where Cyrus was videoed inhaling it through a bong. The video comes from TMZ.com. Sales of the substance have tripled since the video went public, according to Fox News.