Children & Families

Meet Daniel Caracheo, one of more than 6,000 Michigan "dreamers."

The stories of young immigrants in one Michigan community

Rural counties across a band of northern Michigan have disability rates up to 18 percent, with little hope these former workers will return to jobs. Experts are trying to reverse the trend.

Across the northern Lower Peninsula, high poverty and unemployment often are accompanied by high rates of residents receiving disability checks.

The NAACP urges a moratorium on new charter schools. A new law, though, already limits their growth in Detroit.

A new statewide program aims to intervene with children exposed to drugs or violence to help them become healthy, capable adults

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments Monday on whether the man, convicted of having sex with his underage girlfriend, should be allowed back into the U.S.

Pneumonia was blamed for 177 deaths over two years. Experts say Legionnaires’ was likely the culprit in some of the deaths, but patients were never tested. The county is now requiring such testing.

With about 300,000 Michigan adults with serious mental illness, the changes allow judges to order outpatient treatment more quickly, before a crisis

Last Christmas, Ramone Williams was living out of a van. Today, he’s a college graduate with an office job, and the inspiration for a communitywide effort to help the homeless.

Michigan is among states that spend the lowest percentage of welfare dollars on services intended to help struggling people rejoin the workforce. Its strategy: Finding creative ways to relabel other budget items as welfare spending.

Michigan has fewer school nurses than almost any state. Some districts are getting creative to try to solve the problem

Delivering pallets of water was the easy part. Now it gets messy, as various players jockey for position, balance competing interests and struggle with plans to repair the city and its people after a crisis like no other.

15,000 donations have poured in to help Flint kids battling lead poisoning. One-dollar bills and five-figure checks arrive almost daily from schoolchildren and prison inmates, elderly widows and romance writers. Here are a few of their stories

More resources are being sought for transportation that recently doubled the number of Flint-area residents hired and bused to jobs in Livingston County.

A Bridge investigation found government aid is long gone for Detroit homes damaged by historic floods in 2014. Many of these homes were never even visited. One reason: A federal report says the state warned FEMA that Detroit was too perilous for the agency to conduct door-to-door interviews.

Quality child care for low-income workers benefits families, but also the businesses that parents work for. Yet only a small fraction of businesses subsidize child care and the Michigan Chamber says it is not pushing to increase state funding.

A federally funded program to help the poorest workers pay for child care used to serve 60,000 Michigan families, three times what it serves now. A 2008 audit exposed financial lapses, caregivers with criminal pasts, and possible fraud. The numbers have yet to recover.

Michigan has one of the most restrictive policies in the nation on giving low-income families access to subsidized child care. Yet research shows investing in high-quality care can put more parents back to work and improves the odds for vulnerable children

Bertie Marble’s death certificate points to pneumonia. But an attorney for her family, and her own medical records, raise questions about whether she was an uncounted victim of Legionnaires’ disease. Experts say toll may be far larger.