“What do you want to do?” her mom responded. “Sell our house?”

Warning! Never suggest a grand gesture to an idealistic teenager. Hannah seized upon the idea of selling the luxurious family home and donating half the proceeds to charity, while using the other half to buy a more modest replacement home.

Eventually, that’s what the family did. The project ”” crazy, impetuous and utterly inspiring ”” is chronicled in a book by father and daughter scheduled to be published next month: “The Power of Half.” It’s a book that, frankly, I’d be nervous about leaving around where my own teenage kids might find it. An impressionable child reads this, and the next thing you know your whole family is out on the street.

At a time of enormous needs in Haiti and elsewhere, when so many Americans are trying to help Haitians by sending everything from text messages to shoes, the Salwens offer an example of a family that came together to make a difference ”” for themselves as much as the people they were trying to help.

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Jeiel Ballard and his girlfriend, both 16, are dressed up in their best attire, ready for a night of dancing and fun.

But there will be no close embraces or risque moves to test chaperones on the dance floor. The “purity ball” sponsored by their Seventh-day Adventist Church will feature a vow to abstain from sex until marriage and offer tips on “appropriate” touching between the sexes.

“It’s tough, but when you have sex at an early age it can become addictive,” Ballard said. “And when you get addicted … it can lead you down the wrong path.”

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For teenagers, the effects of a drunken night out may linger long after the hangover wears off.

A recent study led by neuroscientist Susan Tapert of the University of California, San Diego compared the brain scans of teens who drink heavily with the scans of teens who don’t.

Tapert’s team found damaged nerve tissue in the brains of the teens who drank. The researchers believe this damage negatively affects attention span in boys, and girls’ ability to comprehend and interpret visual information.

“First of all, the adolescent brain is still undergoing several maturational processes that render it more vulnerable to some of the effects of substances,” Tapert says.

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Obama should launch his own moon shot. What the country needs most now is not more government stimulus, but more stimulation. We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses, excited about innovation and entrepreneurship again. We need to make 2010 what Obama should have made 2009: the year of innovation, the year of making our pie bigger, the year of “Start-Up America.”

Obama should make the centerpiece of his presidency mobilizing a million new start-up companies that won’t just give us temporary highway jobs, but lasting good jobs that keep America on the cutting edge. The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things, is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things. Without inventing more new products and services that make people more productive, healthier or entertained ”” that we can sell around the world ”” we’ll never be able to afford the health care our people need, let alone pay off our debts.

Obama should bring together the country’s leading innovators and ask them: “What legislation, what tax incentives, do we need right now to replicate you all a million times over” ”” and make that his No. 1 priority. Inspiring, reviving and empowering Start-up America is his moon shot.

And to reignite his youth movement, he should make sure every American kid knows about two programs that he has already endorsed: The first is National Lab Day. Introduced last November by a coalition of educators and science and engineering associations, Lab Day aims to inspire a wave of future innovators, by pairing veteran scientists and engineers with students in grades K-12 to inspire thousands of hands-on science projects around the country.

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A handful of top universities around the nation have recorded banner years in freshman applications, including a 42 percent increase at the University of Chicago, a 19 percent rise at Princeton and a 17 percent increase at the University of Pennsylvania. The number of applications to Chicago has doubled since 2006, and the number to Harvard topped 30,000 for the first time.

“It’s a migration of high school seniors to strong institutions, strong brands,” said John Latting, dean of undergraduate admissions at Hopkins. “Either they are prepared to pay, or they are confident that the aid is out there for them.”

Some admissions experts say the increase simply means each senior is applying to more schools. Each new group of seniors applies to a larger number of schools, “with the hope of hitting the merit-money jackpot,” said Sally Rubenstone, senior adviser at the Web site College Confidential. “Acceptance rates plummet, which, in turn, terrifies the next crop of seniors, who then apply to an even longer list of schools.”

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Caught this on the morning run–brings it home. Watch it all.

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More than half of black males between the ages of 16 and 19 are unemployed, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And that’s only counting those seeking work. Economists say legions of other young black men ”” nobody knows how many ”” have given up looking.

Sitting in an empty classroom at the YouthBuild Charter School in Washington, D.C., Andre Johnson, 18, talks about his fruitless job search.

“I apply for jobs every day,” he says. “And usually I do it online, ’cause I know before when I used to go in the stores, they used to look at me actually different and weird, and they say, ‘Oh we don’t have no applications or nothing,’ and I never believed them.”

Academics believe fewer than 14 in 100 young black men actually have jobs. Washington, D.C., has the worst teen employment rate in the country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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When a student dies, even the most bustling school can feel like a mausoleum.

Grief professionals come in, information assemblies are held and young people are encouraged to discuss their emotions in groups or one-on-one meetings with counselors.

But asking students to relive or recollect a tragedy could hurt more than help, according to a new commentary published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Psychological debriefing could actually contribute to post-traumatic stress disorder rather than stave it off, researchers from Dalhousie University write.

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Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomeos I, a spiritual leader who represents Eastern Orthodox Christianity, has urged young Christians to resist secularisation in Europe in a message to an ecumenical meeting that was greeted by global and regional leaders.

“After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe no longer recognises the place for Christianity that history dedicated to it – it is as if Christianity were being expelled from the history of Europe,” said Bartholomeos I, the Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.

The Patriarch made his appeal in a message sent to a five-day European Youth Meeting, organised by France’s ecumenical Taizé Community in Poznan, Poland.

“We wish to recall here that the identity of Europe is primarily Christian and cannot be considered without this legacy,” he said in his message to the 29 December-2 January gathering. “The secularisation of Europe here takes the form of a rejection of the God of history. Nonetheless, the mobilisation of Christians throughout Europe is an important initiative recalling the Christian roots of this continent, its identity and its values.”

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In September, a 13-year-old girl in Florida named Hope Witsell hanged herself. Raised in a rural Florida suburb, she was the only child of a church-going couple who met in the post office where they’re both employed. “She often went fishing with her father in her big, white-framed sunglasses,” according to the excellent reporting in this story in the St. Petersburg Times.

It is painful but you need to read it all.

Which minister of God would tolerate any hindrance to the flow of thanksgiving/offering procession during any service or special church event?

This was the challenge the then Vicar of the All Saints Church (Anglican Communion), Ojuelegba, Surulere Lagos, Reverend Caleb Mmaduoma, now Bishop of Ideato Diocese, had 14 years ago.

What started as one young boy’s spirit filled dance to the offering box, whenever the church’s band started rendering exhilarating praise and worship songs during offering or thanks giving period, later became a teething problem which many parishioners had wanted to be done without.

From being a one man’s dance show to the offering box, many other boys joined the dance train and looked up to every Sunday or church event to pour their sorrow and joy to the Lord through their slow paced gyrating dance steps.

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As someone with two daughters this is a concern; I also think it would make for interesting viewing and discussion in the context of youth ministry–KSH.

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But it’s really just keeping that message of hope and peace out there and alive, and I think what we believe the foundation is, is that Mattie’s message is not unique. He offered us the universal message, you know: Give and you shall receive.

A wonderful reminder in what for many of us is stewardship season.

The movie with the most buzz at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was “Precious,” an Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry-produced story of a young woman living in poverty. Precious is a survivor of incest and emotional and physical abuse who is unsupported by the adults around her. The movie is an unlikely hit because of its raw portrayal of tough, even taboo subjects, and because of the searing effect it has on those who see it.

The story of Precious is so unsettling that it would be easy to write her life off as just another product of Hollywood. Her experiences are seemingly unthinkable and it’s hard to accept that her story could be real.

But it is. Even in Charleston.

In our state, a teen gets pregnant every 50 minutes. The teen pregnancy rate in South Carolina increased 8 percent from 2004 to 2006.

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Ed Balls is facing legal challenges from faith groups and individuals over his announcement of mandatory sex education lessons for pupils before they reach the age of consent.

Religious groups reacted with anger to the move by the Schools Secretary, which will make it compulsory for all pupils aged 15 will learn about relationships, sex and drugs over the course of a year. The age of consent in the UK is 16. The Muslim Council of Britain vowed to mount a challenge to the new laws that it says contravene the right for children to be taught according to their parents’ tradition.

Shahid Akmal, chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain’s education committee, said parents would be forced to break the law because of their beliefs. “It will cause difficulty,” he said. “I cannot condone people breaking the law, but it will be an individual decision and some parents will feel that it’s the only option open to them.”

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Emma Thompson may be best known for the stories she’s been part of on screen and stage, but now she wants to tell you a different sort of tale. It’s the story of a young girl, Elena, who was forced into the global sex industry.

Elena is from a small town in the Eastern European republic of Moldova. At the age of 18, she was promised a job and a future in the U.K. When she arrived, she was made into a prostitute.

Thompson, who met Elena through her involvement with a group that works to help survivors of such experiences, has curated and championed an art installation inspired by Elena’s story. It’s called Journey, and it has its New York opening this November. The installation comprises seven shipping containers, each designed by a different artist to interpret one part of what Thompson calls Elena’s “journey into hell.”

Thompson tells Scott Simon that she was immediately drawn to Elena ”” to protect her privacy, NPR isn’t using Elena’s last name ”” because “she’s a survivor, and most survivors are extraordinary people.” As they got to know each other better, however, one of Elena’s qualities struck a particularly special chord with Thompson: “Her capacity to tell this story whilst laughing and smiling and being positive about it and herself.”

I caught this by accident this morning on the way to the grocery store and it is still haunting me. Take the time to listen to it all (about 8 1/2 minutes).

Over the past two years, government officials and experts have seen an increasing number of children leave home for life on the streets, including many under 13. Foreclosures, layoffs, rising food and fuel prices and inadequate supplies of low-cost housing have stretched families to the extreme, and those pressures have trickled down to teenagers and preteens.

Federal studies and experts in the field have estimated that at least 1.6 million juveniles run away or are thrown out of their homes annually. But most of those return home within a week, and the government does not conduct a comprehensive or current count.

The best measure of the problem may be the number of contacts with runaways that federally-financed outreach programs make, which rose to 761,000 in 2008 from 550,000 in 2002, when current methods of counting began. (The number fell in 2007, but rose sharply again last year, and the number of federal outreach programs has been fairly steady throughout the period.)

Too young to get a hotel room, sign a lease or in many cases hold a job, young runaways are increasingly surviving by selling drugs, panhandling or engaging in prostitution, according to the National Runaway Switchboard, the federally-financed national hot line created in 1974. Legitimate employment was hard to find in the summer of 2009; the Labor Department said fewer than 30 percent of teenagers had jobs.

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“Without Louis Mulkey, I’m not sure A.J. would be here,” said Bulldogs coach Mark Richt.

Mulkey was a fireman who, when he wasn’t at the station, was working as an assistant junior varsity basketball and football coach when he first spotted Green. It was difficult not to notice a 6-foot-1 eighth grader who already could dunk.

Mulkey became a major part of all his young players’ lives because he’d do whatever it took to help them along.

“In my eighth grade year, he sat in my math class. It was crazy. I wasn’t doing too good, was talking and stuff, and he sat through it a couple weeks making sure I was paying attention,” Green said.

Along with Summerville school counselors, this fireman/coach helped Green get through a reading disability and urged him along when there were real questions about whether he would academically qualify for Georgia.

It was Mulkey who drove Green the 275 miles to Athens to attend a Nike camp, the first time he laid eyes on campus. And it was Mulkey who, on little sleep and after loading up the pepperoni rolls his wife packed, brought Green back to Athens his junior year. That was when the young star verbally committed to the Bulldogs.

Posted with special thanksgiving for the life of Louis Mulkey, RIP. Read it carefully and read it all.

The new chief officer of the public schools here, Ron Huberman, a former police officer and transit executive with a passion for data analysis, has a plan to stop the killings of the city’s public school students. And it does not have to do with guns or security guards. It has to do with statistics and probability.

The plan comes too late for Derrion Albert, the 16-year-old who was beaten to death recently with wood planks after getting caught on his way home between two rival South Side gangs, neither of which he was a member, the police said.

The killing, captured on cellphone video and broadcast on YouTube, among other places, has once again caused widespread grief over a seemingly intractable problem here. Derrion, a football player on the honor roll, was the third youth to die violently this academic year ”” and the 67th since the beginning of the 2007-8 school year. And hundreds of others have survived shootings or severe beatings on their way to and from school.

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Cristen Chinea, a senior at M.I.T., made a confession in her blog on the college Web site.

“There’ve been several times when I felt like I didn’t really fit in at M.I.T.,” she wrote. “I nearly fell asleep during a Star Wars marathon. It wasn’t a result of sleep deprivation. I was bored out of my mind.”

Still, in other ways, Ms. Chinea feels right at home at the institute ”” she loves the anime club, and that her hall has its own wiki Web site and an Internet Relay for real-time messaging. As she wrote on her blog, a hallmate once told her that “M.I.T. is the closest you can get to living in the Internet,” and Ms. Chinea reported, “IT IS SO TRUE. Love. It. So. Much.”

Dozens of colleges ”” including Amherst, Bates, Carleton, Colby, Vassar, Wellesley and Yale ”” are embracing student blogs on their Web sites, seeing them as a powerful marketing tool for high school students, who these days are less interested in official messages and statistics than in first-hand narratives and direct interaction with current students.

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Nowadays you practically have to kill somebody to get blacklisted in Hollywood. Mere rape, by contrast, scarcely jiggles the needle of outrage. Producer Harvey Weinstein actually went so far as to describe Mr. Polanski’s odious conduct as a “so-called crime.” The names of such noted filmmakers as Mr. Allen, Jonathan Demme, Michael Mann, Sam Mendes, Mike Nichols, Martin Scorsese and Steven Soderbergh can be found on an international petition whose 100-plus signers “demand the immediate release of Roman Polanski.” Equally predictable was the response of European bureaucrats such as French culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand, who called Mr. Polanski’s arrest “absolutely dreadful,” adding that it made “no sense” for him to be “thrown to the lions for an ancient story.”

We need not take the remonstrations of the French too seriously. They have a long history of forgiving their own artists for pretty much anything, up to and including open collaboration with the Nazis. Far more interesting was the response on this side of the Atlantic. At first, American reaction to the arrest appeared to be breaking along the usual red vs. blue fault lines, with much being made of the fact that Samantha Gailey, Mr. Polanski’s victim, has said that she’s forgiven him (though that didn’t stop her from suing him in civil court in 1988””or from accepting an undisclosed out-of-court settlement to drop the suit).

But the cultural tide started to turn on Monday when Kate Harding, a contributor to Salon.com, wrote a column called “Reminder: Roman Polanski Raped a Child” in which she pointed out, bluntly and accurately, that Mr. Polanski “gave a 13-year-old girl a Quaalude and champagne, then raped her. . . . There is evidence that the victim did not consent, regardless of her age.” Ms. Harding’s piece included a link to the transcript of Ms. Gailey’s 1977 grand-jury testimony, in which she described with gruesome explicitness the crime perpetrated on her person””a crime of which Mr. Polanski acknowledged his guilt in court.

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Watch it all–makes the heart sad–KSH.

Beckham has been an educator for more than 33 years, an administrator for 15 years and principal of Wando, the state’s largest high school, since 1998. She oversaw the school’s move into its new building in 2004, and she helped create four career-related schools of study and a ninth-grade academy to ensure students have more opportunities for personal connections. Students meet weekly with faculty advisers and, as upperclassmen, with an administrator or counselor who monitors and supports them through graduation.

Under Beckham’s leadership, Wando has been the recipient of numerous statewide and national accolades. The school was named one of the best in the country by U.S. News & World Report, its band was recognized as best in the nation, and both its newspaper and culinary arts programs have garnered national honors.

After receiving the award, Beckham told those gathered that this honor wasn’t about her and that it was their award. She credited teachers, students, parents and the community for making the school the great place that it is. She called it a principal’s dream to be in a town such as Mount Pleasant, where officials support the school any way they can.

“Wando is an incredible place,” she said. “Everyone here is committed to excellence.”

Read the whole article from the front page of the local paper.

Scroll down the [Unity, Oregon, Burnt River] Bulls’ lineup, and all seems typical ”” at the beginning, at least. There’s Caleb Andrews, a senior fullback, from Hereford, Ore. There’s Justus Wise, senior halfback, also from Hereford.

But after that, the Burnt River lineup turns into a trip around the globe ”” Kan Bakai Uchkun Uulu, left guard from Kyrgyzstan; Szu-Yao Su, quarterback from Taiwan; Jovan Radakovic, left end from Serbia. Not to mention Ju Hyoung Park, right end from South Korea; Cem Erdogdo, right guard from Germany; and Ban Du, center from China.

Six foreign exchange students have turned the Burnt River Bulls into a virtual United Nations in helmets and pads.

These 15- to 17-year-olds plopped down in the Eastern Oregon town of Unity, population of about 120, for a crash course in rural America. Like a lot of remote areas, Unity brings in exchange students to increase funding for schools ”” and for the cultural give-and-take with the locals.

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The principal of Millburn High, New Jersey’s top-ranked high school, says it has gone on for a decade: annual hazing by senior girls who create a “slut list” of incoming freshmen for the first day of school. A dozen or more names are written on a piece of notebook paper, with crass descriptions, and copies are passed around ”” hundreds this year, some say.

“We’ve had girls ”” which is one of the bad things ”” obsessed that their names are on it, and girls who were upset that they didn’t make the list,” said the principal, William Miron. “It’s basically vulgar.”

And that is not the only type of hazing that goes on, some girls say. Seniors blow whistles in some girls’ faces and jostle or push them into lockers, leaving them afraid to come to school the next day.

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U.S. states whose residents have more conservative religious beliefs on average tend to have higher rates of teenagers giving birth, a new study suggests.

The relationship could be due to the fact that communities with such religious beliefs (a literal interpretation of the Bible, for instance) may frown upon contraception, researchers say. If that same culture isn’t successfully discouraging teen sex, the pregnancy and birth rates rise.

Mississippi topped the list for conservative religious beliefs and teen birth rates, according to the study results, which will be detailed in a forthcoming issue of the journal Reproductive Health.

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No one would accuse Erika DeBenedictis of having a light schedule. Ms. DeBenedictis, 17, recently finished her junior year at the Albuquerque Academy in New Mexico, where she took A.P. Physics, A.P. Chemistry and a multivariable calculus class simultaneously. When she wasn’t doing homework, she worked on computer-programming projects for science fairs, entering several over the course of the year. She practiced the piano for 30 minutes most days and got up early to sing in a choir, too.

In other words, she could be the poster girl for the “overscheduled child” phenomenon that parents and educators like to work themselves into a stew about every time the calendar flips to September. Kids feel so much pressure to build a college-worthy résumé, the story goes, that they’re sleep-deprived and anxious””or as psychiatrist Gail Saltz put it at a lunch I attended recently: “You might have a child who really wants to learn Mandarin . . . but if they are pushed too hard, you will likely wind up with a child who speaks perfect Chinese . . . on Xanax!”

So is Ms. DeBenedictis facing a nervous breakdown as she enters her senior year? Hardly. “I’m very happy when I’m busy,” she tells me. It’s when she doesn’t have enough to do that she starts “moping around.”

She’s onto something worth pondering in this back-to-school season….

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The Barna Group pollsters and the Innovating Tomorrow blog site reports that 75% of teens from Christian families stop going to church when they leave home to get a job or go to college and don’t return to church until they have are married and have children of their own. Some blogsters blame the teen walk out on a general increase in agnosticism and atheism. Some blame the parents. Some blame the internet. I don’t agree.

I blame the churches. I blame the dumbing down of the message so that many leave out of sheer boredom. The rock music and mimicking of worldly culture which was thought to appeal to teens is driving some away. However, I think the main problem is the lack of content and the metaphysical shallowness of the teachings. During one’s late teen years, one is trying to discover the meaning and purpose in life. The teens want to gain a sense of who they are and to find a place for themselves in the grand scheme of things.

Questions on meaning and purpose and questions about the grand scheme are metaphysical questions. The typical evangelical ministry behaves as though they are afraid of metaphysics. For this reason, many teens find the shallow ministries offered to them irrelevant to their needs. This is the only convincing explanation I can think of to explain the general teen walkout.

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