A Juvenile Welfare Board employee has received a prestigious award for her hard work in the community.

April Putzulu has spent most of her life being an advocate for children.

“Oh, my goodness. Over 30 years, I’ve been working for youth-serving organizations, juvenile justice, behavioral health, foster care, and now with the Juvenile Welfare Board,” she said.

April is proud of all the programs she’s had a hand in: like the PACE Center for Girls, Big Game James Club with the Tampa Bay Rays for Foster Children and the Heart Gallery.  

“It really has been my privilege to be part of campaigns and initiatives that are both life-changing and life-saving,” she added.

She received the Spirit of Community Award for all her hard work.  

The award is given by the Florida Commission on the Status of Women to people who have improved women’s lives and serve as a positive role model for women and girls in their community.

“I was very surprised,” said April. “My mantra is to shine quietly. And I’m usually on the other side of the camera in my communications and marketing work. So, I was very humbled but very grateful.” 

Grateful to be contributing to the lives of families.

“I think always growing up. I wanted to serve others through community service or my church. So, it has always been instilled in me to give children and families the tools that they need to be the best individuals that they can be,” April said.

Skills that she believes are important for children to have.

“I love the fact that, on paper, children are 16 percent of our population. They represent a very small part of our population, but they’re 100 percent of our future. So, when we look at it, we really need to invest early,” she explained.

An early investment that April says is important.

“Whether you’re serving the aging, or you’re serving children, or you’re serving veterans. But the key is to serve that. The key is to do good,” she said.

Read the article and watch the video segment on Fox13.com.

With a packed auditorium of Pinellas County high schoolers, the sixth annual “Rising Above” Youth Explosion concluded its three-day event on July 21 with a focus on teens and mental health.

Highlights included a pantomime skit that depicted how mental illness affect youth and families, performed by students from Clearwater’s North Greenwood Recreation Center, Arts Conservatory for Teens, and Gibbs High School. The performance was followed by a panel of youth with lived mental health experiences who courageously shared their journeys and fielded questions from their peers.

The event was hosted by the Clearwater Neighborhood Family Center, Juvenile Welfare Board, NAMI Pinellas, and St. Petersburg College Clearwater Campus.

Read the article as originally published at https://www.tbnweekly.com/clearwater_beacon/article_c8de5bba-35f9-11ee-9c58-07748b102a06.html

Four-month-old Emma was dressed in a pink onesie with a heart on it when her mother awoke to find her dead.

It was the second time in two years that Nicole Iannone had found one of her children dead after falling asleep with the baby, according to police reports. She had lost a baby boy after sharing a bed with him in Philadelphia, police found.

Just a few days after Emma’s death in January, Gulfport police arrested Iannone on a manslaughter charge.

But in May, prosecutors decided not to file charges. A medical examiner’s report detected that the child had a gene abnormality linked to heart problems and was unable to determine her cause of death.

U.S. public health officials discourage bed sharing between parents and infants, saying that babies should sleep on their backs in a crib with only a fitted sheet, free of materials that could suffocate them. Parent and child should share a room, but not a bed, for at least the first six months, they advise.

Still, some parents choose to disregard the advice. The practice has even gained traction in some corners of social media. Some researchers argue it can be done safely.

Criminal investigations can prove murky. In the United States, nearly 75% of unexpected infant deaths in 2020 were classified as sudden infant death syndrome or an undetermined cause of death.

Connie Shingledecker, chairperson of Florida’s Child Abuse Death Review Team, trains police and medical examiners to investigate these deaths. A retired major at the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office, Shingledecker advises law enforcement officers to gather as much information as possible before making an arrest.

“In that respect, you’ll feel that you have the best information,” she said. “And then you make a decision.”

“THEY DON’T KNOW”

Iannone told her fiance, Jack Gough, that she had always wanted to be a mom.

He worked two jobs to support the family. Iannone took on the majority of child care as a stay-at-home mom, according to a Gulfport police report.

The couple had moved to Florida to be closer to Iannone’s family. Police reports recorded their housing status as “transient.”

The couple’s first child, Ryder, died after Iannone took him into her bed and fell asleep. The 2-month-old boy was wearing an over-the-counter heart monitor, and Iannone woke up when it started going off. The baby had blood coming from his nose and his heart wasn’t beating, according to a hospital report.

On her first birthday after her son’s death, Iannone raised money for the American SIDS Institute in memory of her son.

Neither Iannone nor Gough could be reached for comment in recent weeks at phone numbers or addresses listed under their names in public records.

Though some health officials had warned Iannone about co-sleeping and the couple had resolved at times not to co-sleep, Iannone told police she had seen information on social media promoting bed sharing.

She also told police that she hadn’t been told what caused Ryder’s death, and that she had been told he had died of sudden infant death syndrome. She asked if testing could be done on Emma because she wanted to know of health problems that could be passed on if she had other kids.

Yet her sleeping arrangements presented hazards flagged even by some researchers who champion bed sharing: The bed was wedged against a wall, where an infant can get stuck, and Emma was bottle-fed instead of breastfed, a risk factor that can make co-sleeping more dangerous, as researchers believe breastfeeding moms are more attuned to their baby’s movements throughout the night.

The Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner’s Office had not completed its autopsy of Emma, but Iannone told officers she intended to move back to Pennsylvania. They arrested her before she could leave.

“Because she only recently moved to Florida from Pennsylvania, and didn’t have ties here, the likelihood of her fleeing prosecution was great,” Sgt. Thomas Woodman said in an email. “Based on the totality of our investigation, we had probable cause for her arrest and didn’t require the autopsy report to develop probable cause.”

When the Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner’s Office released its report, however, the case became more complicated. Genetic testing on Emma found that the child had an abnormality on a gene that has been linked to heart problems. As a result, the office couldn’t determine the cause and manner of the infant’s death.

That prompted prosecutors to drop the case without filing charges, according to Assistant State Attorney Christie Ellis.

While researchers were able to determine that Emma had a genetic abnormality, it’s hard to say whether it would have caused or contributed to the infant’s death. Mutations in this specific gene have been linked to atrial fibrillation and may also be connected to other heart problems. Still, not all genetic abnormalities cause health issues, according to Christopher Snyder, a pediatric cardiologist who reviewed the report for the Tampa Bay Times.

“They don’t know whether it causes lone atrial fibrillation or something else or potentially nothing,” Snyder said.

SAFE SLEEP PRACTICES

Though the medical examiner’s office could not determine the child’s cause of death, they did not categorize it as sudden infant death syndrome.

That’s because Pinellas-Pasco medical examiners stopped classifying infant deaths this way in 2000. They found that many of the deaths were caused by suffocation in unsafe sleeping situations. They believed that sudden infant death syndrome confused parents, making them think that the children died of unknown causes, rather than preventable factors, such as unsafe sleeping situations.

Still, sometimes the office classifies a death as undetermined when there isn’t enough information to identify a singular cause of death, as was the case here, said Bill Pellan, director of investigations for the medical examiner’s office.

Many infant sleep deaths are caused by asphyxiation and unsafe sleeping situations, Pellan said.

While American health officials discourage bed sharing, those in the United Kingdom have focused on ways to make it safer.

Some U.S. researchers have also found that there are ways to bed share safely, including James McKenna, a professor at Santa Clara University and professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. McKenna has spent about 40 years studying the connections between infant sleep, breastfeeding and unexpected infant sleep deaths.

Safe sleeping starts before the baby is born, McKenna said. Parents who smoked during pregnancy, for instance, should not bed share because it increases the risk of the baby dying in their sleep.

Parents also should not bed share if intoxicated or taking medication that would make them drowsy. They should also keep the child away from pillows, stuffed animals and soft bedding.

And they should never sleep on a sofa or couch with their infant.

“Just like you arrange a safe crib environment for your baby, there’s a way to arrange a safe bed-sharing environment for a baby,” McKenna said.

CONDUCTING AND INVESTIGATION

Investigating infant deaths can be difficult for police, who must balance their responsibilities with sensitivity to grieving parents.

Determining criminal culpability in these cases can be difficult, and at times, controversial. When a Wisconsin state representative crafted a bill that would criminalize intoxicated parents who share a bed with their child, it was criticized by some who said the state should instead focus on prevention by addressing poverty, mental health and substance abuse. That bill ultimately failed to pass in two different sessions.

Such laws are also not always applied evenly. Dorothy Roberts, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has studied the criminalization of mothers, in particular Black women who used drugs while pregnant. When mothers are prosecuted for harm to a child, women of color and low-income white women are more likely to face legal consequences, she said.

“Punishing mothers — marginalized mothers — has long been a way of diverting attention from the real harms to children and the kinds of radical changes we would need to truly support children and keep them safe,” she said.

When Shingledecker, the retired Manatee County Sheriff’s Office major, first began her career in the 1970s, police were told not to “retraumatize” parents by asking too many questions during investigations into infant deaths.

“I think, unfortunately, that during that time period, the lack of thorough investigation … probably led to untold numbers of child homicide cases that we’ll never know,” Shingledecker said, noting high–profile cases where moms smothered their babies.

Shingledecker teaches police how to use doll reenactments to learn more about how the child died, having parents show officers how the child was positioned and where they were, both after they went to sleep and after they were found dead.

“I tell these detectives … the most important thing that you’re doing right now is helping us by gathering as much information so we can prevent future death,” she said.

Read the article as originally published at https://www.tampabay.com/news/breaking-news/2023/08/05/bed-sharing-cosleeping-baby-dangers-warnings/

One in five children in Pinellas County do not have enough nutritious food for an active, healthy life. The Juvenile Welfare Board, in a partnership with the St. Petersburg Free Clinic, are working to change that.

JWB’s Board has invested in bulk food purchases and a centralized hub with the St. Petersburg Free Clinic. In turn, the Free Clinic orchestrates the distribution of food to dozens of partner sites, feeding children and families countywide.

“Last year, JWB led the charge in SPFC’s ability to distribute more than 20.4 million pounds of food throughout Pinellas County, serving 1.2 million individuals in 2022 alone,” said Jennifer Yeagley, the Free Clinic’s CEO. “They do this through distributing food to partner food pantries, churches, other nonprofit organizations, neighborhood family centers, and even preschools.”

On average, the Free Clinic serves more than 135,000 individuals a month across Pinellas County, a 51% increase year over year.

This is achieved thanks to dozens of food partners across the county, like Dunedin Cares and FEAST.

The Free Clinic also coordinates JWB’s funded food program, distributing pre-packaged meals to kids at schools, NFCs, and after school programs and filling food gaps during weekends and summers…to the tune of 200,000 meals last year.

Read the article as originally published at https://www.tbnweekly.com/pinellas_county/article_e0b4dce6-307c-11ee-9f51-fb6c4f194a66.html

Spreading the joy of reading to kids in Pinellas County is the mission of The Summer Book Bus.

There’s something joyous about seeing kids who are excited to read. Children at Northside Boys & Girls Club in St. Petersburg are all excited about their new books. They got the books for free from the Summer Book Bus. 

The Book Bus is a partnership between the Juvenile Welfare Board and Pinellas County Schools. The goal of the program is to keep kids engaged in learning during the summer months when they are out of school. 

“When they start the school year. It’ll take a couple of months for them to pick up where they left off the last year,” said Joanna Maniscalco, Community Collaboration Coordinator for Juvenile Welfare Board of Pinellas County. “If they’re doing reading, if they’re in these programs, if they’re doing the different things during the summer that allows that the new teacher will be able to pick up from where they left off the last year.” 

The bus makes about 70 stops each summer throughout Pinellas County, giving away free books. It’s been going on for seven years.

“We’ve seen about 27,000 kids, and we’ve given out about 55,000 books throughout Pinellas from St. Pete all the way up to Tarpon,” Maniscalco shared. “They’re not going to be collecting dust on a bookshelf if kids pick their own books. They are so much more likely to read the book.” 

Maniscalco said just maybe one book in the hands of a child will make all the difference in the years to come. 

Read the article and view the news segment at https://www.fox13news.com/news/book-bus-helping-kids-read-throughout-pinellas-county

“We’re recovering, but we’re recovering slowly,” said Lee Bryant, PCTA President.

Bryant is the new president of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association, but this is his first year outside of the classroom after teaching high school for 28 years.

He saw firsthand how the COVID-19 pandemic affected teachers and students.

“I had no idea how to teach on Teams. Then we went away for Spring Break, and they said, ‘you’re not coming back.’ And I was like, ok, let’s figure this out. So there was a loss on the part of the teachers,” said Bryant.

He said learning loss wasn’t created by the pandemic but made it much worse.

“Learning loss has been a problem in the inner city, in poor areas, in places where there are parents who have two or three jobs quite often where they are not able to interact with their children. And it got amplified with the pandemic,” said Bryant.

“I think the pandemic presented a lot of challenges for students who were struggling to stay engaged and continue learning and making progress,” said Karen Boggess, JWB’s Chief Program Officer.

Newly released statewide test scores from the Florida Department of Education show that 50% of students in 3rd-10th grade tested on grade level or above in English Language Arts.

While 56% of 3rd-8th graders tested on grade level or above in math.

School officials said this shows that they are making improvements from pandemic-era learning, but not enough.

“And it still hasn’t caught up,” said Bryant.

Groups like the Juvenile Welfare Board of Pinellas County have been working around the clock through different programs to make sure students are catching up.

“It is extremely critical and important because we want all children in Pinellas to be successful and to be academically on track,” said Boggess.

As the start of the new school year looms, teachers want students and families to start getting ready now, fearing the summer slide will make it that much more difficult to learn when students return.

“Having children read on a regular basis every single day so they don’t get out of that pattern,” said Boggess.

They recommend dedicating about 30 minutes or more to reading every day to make the transition easier when school starts.

“They need to start preparing themselves by doing some of the mental gymnastics it will take when they go into school,” said Bryant.

“As parents get back into a structure with our kids, having them go to bed in a timely manner so that they are ready to go to school is also important,” said Boggess.

Read the article and watch the news segment with on-camera interviews at https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/region-pinellas/students-continue-to-battle-learning-loss-teachers-encourage-them-to-start-preparing-for-the-school-year-now