Black History Month: Rufus King grads aspire to become dentists
The Brief
A pair of Milwaukee Public Schools graduates are setting their sights on becoming dentists.
Kydra Johnson and Sheldon Cruickshank attend Marquette Dental School.
The two hope to one day open a practice in Milwaukee to give back to the community.
MILWAUKEE - Kydra Johnson looks back at what made her happy as a child and realized she was a little different from the others.
"I loved going to the dentist when I was younger," Johnson said. "I had a really, really good dentist."
Johnson had a really good dentist – and apparently, a really good role model.
"So I was like, hmmm, maybe being a dentist isn't so bad," Johnson said.
What we know
Since 4th grade, the plan has been in place. The Rufus King graduation set her sights on Marquette University – and then Marquette Dental school.
Despite strong grades and soaring in science, Johnson was a little nervous about getting accepted to the program. She turned to another Milwaukee Public Schools graduate for support.
"He took his interview before me so he was like you're going to do fine. I was able to give her some tips about what to look out for in the interview," Johnson said.
Sheldon Cruickshank was another child from Milwaukee who also dreamed of making the world smile better. He attended Milwaukee School of Languages. His advice to Johnson was, dental school is hard, let's grin and bear it together.
"It was pretty difficult to get in, especially studying for the 'DAT.' Like we studied for almost three months straight trying to get into school," Cruickshank said.
Like a pair of braces, Johnson and Cruickshank bonded to get through the cavities of dental school.
FREE DOWNLOAD: Get breaking news alerts in the FOX LOCAL Mobile app for iOS or Android
"It made me feel like there's hope for us – because you don't really see too many black dentist coming up especially in Milwaukee and coming out of an MPS school," Cruickshank said.
By the numbers
The numbers tell it all. The dental school receives one or two applicants a year from Milwaukee Public Schools. The national average of Black dentists in the U.S. is just under 4%, according to the American Dental Association.
Those statistics are not lost on Cruickshank's strongest source of support, his mother.
"He's always been this little boy who's always into stuff, always want to do stuff," Denver Cruickshank said. "Sheldon is very ambitious, he's dedicated to whatever he wants to do."
The backstory
But halfway through the dental program came a change.
"There was a point where he wanted to stop," Denver Cruickshank said.
It was not the curriculum or the classes that made him want to quit.
SIGN UP TODAY: Get daily headlines, breaking news emails from FOX6 News
"Right now his Dad is incarcerated. So pretty much everything is on me," Denver Cruickshank said.
Cruickshank feared the financial strain on his mom. He was ready to drop out until he could find a way to pay.
"I told him you gotta keep going because most of the time when kids stop, they don't go back," Denver Cruickshank said. "I literally took a loan and I said I'm going to do whatever it takes for you to continue to finish."
What's next
From there, Cruickshank never missed a beat.
Cruickshank and Johnson are set to graduate in 2027 with hopes of opening their own practice in Milwaukee.
"I would love to come back to Milwaukee and open up a practice and give back to the community," Cruickshank said.
"I don't know any Black orthodontists that live in Milwaukee. So it'd be nice to give back to my community in that way," Johnson said.
The Source
The information in this post was produced by FOX6 News with assistance from Marquette University.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
LaFollette Elementary becomes 7th school cleared of lead dangers, according to MPS
LaFollette Elementary School has been cleared of dangers caused by lead paint, Milwaukee Public Schools announced June 11. It's the seventh school to have passed recent inspections for lead hazards by the City of Milwaukee Health Department. LaFollette school was constructed in 1897, making it among the oldest in MPS. An inspection in March found the building had dangerous levels of chipping paint and dust where young children could potentially ingest it, creating a poisoning hazard. More than 1,000 children in Milwaukee each year are poisoned by lead, mostly due to paint in older houses, according to the city. But a widespread lack of lead paint maintenance in MPS schools came to light in early 2025 after city health officials announced a child had been poisoned by lead paint at Golda Meir Lower Campus. LaFollette was among the early batch of six schools that closed temporarily this spring so lead hazards could be remediated. Closures affected about 1,800 MPS students. In closing March 17, LaFollette's 216 students in kindergarten through eighth grade transitioned to the Wisconsin Conservatory of Lifelong Learning. They will remain there until the end of the school year on Friday, June 13 — about 13 weeks since the initial closure. MPS said that this summer, it will remediate lead paint in all schools built before 1950 that also educate elementary-age kids. It will do the same in schools built between 1950 and 1978 by the end of the calendar year. 'I'm grateful to the LaFollette School community for their continued partnership and patience as we undertook this important work,' Superintendent Brenda Cassellius said in a statement. 'A disruption like this one is never easy, but this school community navigated it with the best interests of students at the forefront. I'm glad we are making good progress on our lead stabilization efforts in our school buildings, guided by our Lead Action Plan. Our students and families deserve school buildings that are safe and welcoming.' According to an inspection report, 50% or more of painted surfaces at LaFollette were found to be deteriorating. "Heavy" levels of paint dust were found throughout the building, the report said. Chipping and peeling paint was found in classrooms with kindergarten-age children and children with disabilities, and in cafeteria areas, the report said. The inspection report also noted signs of disturbed asbestos, which pose "notable health (risks) to both adults & children)." MPS spokesperson Stephen Davis said that, during the March inspection at LaFollette, two potential asbestos-related issues were found: deteriorating plaster in a few areas and the end of the asbestos-containing pipe insulation was exposed and uncovered. The Environmental Protection Agency and Milwaukee Health Department were told the deteriorating plaster was not asbestos-containing, according to historical sample results. In addressing the issue with the pipe insulation, MPS' Environmental Health Services put in an emergency work order to seal the small section of pipe; that work was completed March 17. The pipe's wrapping was repaired to maintain the covering. No asbestos was removed. "The repaired canvas covering maintains the asbestos in a safe manner," Davis said. For LaFollette and all other MPS facilities that follow the EPA's Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act regulation, the district has an asbestos management plan in place to manage and address any maintenance and repair requests. That plan has been in place since the 1980s, he said. MPS also conducts re-inspections to assess the condition of asbestos-containing materials in each school every three years, as required by the EPA. Every six months between reinspections, the school's building engineer checks the building to ensure the asbestos-containing material within the building is undamaged, Davis said. Any damage identified during a three-year reinspection or six-month building check gets immediately fixed through the MPS work order system. Cleo Krejci covers K-12 education and workforce development as a Report For America corps member based at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Contact her at CKrejci@ or follow her on Twitter @_CleoKrejci. For more information about Report for America, visit This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: 128-year-old LaFollette Elementary School abated for lead, MPS says,
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Hospitals Are Drug Testing Mothers Without Consent, Fueling Family Separations
By junior year of high school, Desseray Wright was already a mother and didn't expect to become pregnant again so soon. The Bronx, New York, teen was juggling raising a toddler and dreaming about becoming a lawyer. Sometimes, she would hang out with her friends and occasionally smoked weed. Then one day, despite still getting her period, she found out she was pregnant. She was more than 24 weeks along — too late to consider an abortion. Because Wright smoked weed for several months into her pregnancy, she told a health care provider during a routine prenatal visit. It would be an admission she'd later regret. After giving birth at a Bronx hospital in 1995, she noticed a bag on her baby's scrotum, and demanded answers. Hospital staff told her her son had been drug tested, but didn't explain why. Then a social worker entered her room, questioning her about marijuana use. Within the first hour of her newborn son Trayquan's life, she had lost custody. 'I was honest and truthful with this lady,' recalled Wright, now 47 and a family defense practice policy advocate for the Bronx Defenders. She explained that back then she believed child protective services were only called when there were allegations of abuse. While some policies have changed since Wright's case nearly 30 years ago, health care advocates and legal experts Capital B interviewed said across the country these types of interventions and drug testing without consent still disproportionately target Black and brown mothers. At the center of the disparities, they say, are gaps in federal privacy laws — including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) — which do not require hospitals to inform patients when they are tested for drugs. Civil rights organizations, including those led by justice-impacted Black women like Wright, argue that these covert tests have fueled a long-standing pattern of criminalizing Black and brown women in family courts and separating families under the guise of child protection. These women turned their personal pain into advocacy, calling for legislation to close HIPAA loopholes to prevent other mothers from being swept into both the criminal and family court systems instead of parenthood. There has been legislation introduced in recent years in states like California, New York, and Tennessee — where women have been prosecuted for using drugs while pregnant — to inform expectant mothers that they and their newborn are being tested for drugs. They also have the choice to opt out of those tests. 'Disproportionate drug screening of Black mothers and newborns, without consent, adds to the excessive surveillance of Black families, and leads to an increase in foster care placements,' according to a May 2024 report released by New York State's Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 'Examining the New York Child Welfare System and Its Impact on Black Children and Families.' Last month, the New York state Senate Health Committee passed the Maternal Health, Dignity, and Consent Act on an 11-2 vote. This bill 'is a clear statement that pregnant people do not deserve to be surveilled or criminalized,' Jamila Perritt, who is an OB-GYN and president & CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Health, said in a statement after the bill's advancement on May 13. In Wright's case, child protective services required her to attend family court compliance hearings for parenting classes and a drug treatment program — even though, she said, in the 1990s those services weren't designed for adolescents or applicable to marijuana use. After months of juggling two children and long commutes on public transportation from the Bronx to mostly unhelpful referrals across most of the five boroughs, Wright made the difficult decision to drop out of high school to focus on getting her son back. Capital B has reached out to New York's Office of Child and Family Services via email for comment about its policies, but has not heard back as of publication. They did respond on June 10 to say that they do not comment on pending legislation. Advocates and survivors interviewed by Capital B often refer to the combined family, child welfare, and criminal legal systems as 'family-policing systems.' Pregnant people go into labor inside a hospital almost every day. Between contractions, they, or their partner, may be handed a flood of documents. Included may be a form with legal language that could authorize a nurse practitioner or physician to drug test both the birthing person and their newborn, without clear consent or probable cause. 'The hospitals that are participating in this, it's people of color who are more impacted, and at more disproportionate rates,' said Stephanie Jeffcoat, founder of Families Inspiring Reentry & Reunification 4 Everyone. The organization helps impacted parents navigate multiple interlocking systems such as the family and criminal justice systems, and is part of the steering committee working on establishing informed consent in California. Jeffcoat and Wright say the system is broken due to social workers and other professionals with mandated reporting credentials. Jasmine Sankofa, executive director of the nonprofit organization Movement for Family Power, which is dedicated to abolishing the family policing system, agrees with them. 'There really isn't any research that justifies the use of mandated reporting, the use of test and report,' Sankofa said, adding, 'It's bias based. It's not research based.' She added that 'studies have found that even if a pregnant person was using substances while they were pregnant — even if a child is born and is experiencing neonatal abstinence syndrome, for example — the recommended treatment is the approach is called, 'eat, sleep, and console.'' The best health care for a newborn isn't separation, nor is it to test and report their birthing parent to a family-policing system, Sankofa added. In cases where mom or baby test positive, child protective services are contacted. As the parent goes back and forth to court, the baby is first placed in a foster home, and because of the Adoption and Safe Families Act enacted by former President Bill Clinton in 1997, within 15 months 'states must initiate termination of parental rights proceedings, except in specified circumstances.' Despite her specific circumstances, the California child welfare system still took Jeffcoat's daughter, Harmony Faith Chase, from her nine years ago. Jeffcoat survived being raped, and found out she was pregnant too late for an abortion. At the time she was 28, unhoused, and struggled with substance use. She didn't have health insurance, couldn't afford an abortion, and had an estranged relationship with her mother, who had custody of her two older children. One day, she went to a hospital in Orange County for an eye infection. That's when she later learned she was tested for drugs. Jeffcoat's next visit to the hospital was when she delivered her daughter via C-section. The first hour of Harmony's life was interrupted when a social worker took her away from her mom's arms and was placed into the foster care system — never to be in the care of her mother again. 'I remember the feeling that I felt of losing my child,' said Jeffcoat, now 37. In 2023, a bill was introduced in California that would, in part, prohibit medical personnel from performing a drug or alcohol test or screen on a pregnant person or a newborn without prior written and verbal informed consent, and would require the test or screen to be medically necessary to provide care. That bill failed to advance from the state's Senate health committee in March 2023. Jeffcoat is currently studying law to become an attorney in dependency law. 'I feel like my own attorney failed me,' she said. 'I want to really be up in there [court] making sure that parents aren't losing their kids to the system. Especially in the timeframe of the adoption, it should not have been able to take place in six months. It takes longer for people to be sentenced to jail or prison.' Jeffcoat said she lost custody of Harmony in 2017 while incarcerated for 6½ months for a probation violation. Family court proceedings went on without her being present. Once released, she spiraled deeper into her addiction. In 2019, she had a fight with another unhoused person about her bike. After waking up nearby a dumpster, it was the moment she said she decided to turn her life around. She contested the adoption. In 2021, she found the adopting parents. For three years, Jeffcoat said she reached out to them with hopes to create a post-adoption agreement to at least regain visitation rights, to no avail. 'I needed to make sure that I get into a position to ensure that they do not continue to do this to other people,' said Jeffcoat, who launched her nonprofit in 2023. Perritt, the doctor who is also a fellow of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society of Family Planning, said people 'universally enter' health care professions 'because they want to change social justice issues, but during the course of medical education and training you are taught to conform to a system that exists already in order to survive it.' The history of the medical field being white and male, increases Perritt's beliefs that health care professionals teaming up with police goes back to the country's Founding Fathers. 'The police, to me, are not simply somebody in a police uniform. It's also the doctors, it's also the nurses, it's also the social workers. It's any and everybody who's a mandatory reporter.' Hospitals and health care providers often set their own drug testing and reporting policies — ones that can conflict with the ethical standards taught in medical training, particularly around informed consent and patient trust. In a notable shift, Mass General Brigham, a major hospital system in Boston, stopped automatically filing child neglect reports solely based on a newborn testing positive for drugs, citing a need to reduce unnecessary family separations. Drug testing shouldn't be considered a family testing system, advocates said. In 1996, after Wright lost custody of Trayquan, who was placed in her father's care, her troubles with the family-policing systems continued when she got pregnant with her third child and second son, Hassan. With an ongoing family court case, the newborn was immediately taken away and placed into a foster home in Brooklyn, New York. Hassan was there for nearly four years. Child protective services continued to return to Wright's life twice: when she went to federal prison for 10 years for a weapons and drug conviction, and survived a domestic violence incident by calling 911. After Wright was released from federal prison in 2013, she earned a criminal justice degree from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She mourned the loss of her oldest daughter to gun violence in 2018, and in 2021 held on tight to Hassan, now 28, when he survived being shot. 'I graduated at the top of my class,' Wright said. The post Hospitals Are Drug Testing Mothers Without Consent, Fueling Family Separations appeared first on Capital B News.
Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Yahoo
New Analysis Finds Dementia Caregivers More Likely to Report Modifiable Risk Factors That Increase Their Own Risk for Dementia
– Dementia caregivers under age 45 are particularly vulnerable for having modifiable risk factors for dementia – CHICAGO, June 12, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- A new analysis finds nearly 60% of dementia caregivers report having at least one modifiable risk factor that could increase their own chances of developing dementia. Nearly one in four caregivers (24.3%) report having multiple risk factors. This first-of-its-kind analysis found that dementia caregivers are significantly more likely than the general population to experience conditions such as obesity, diabetes, poor sleep, smoking and hypertension. The most pronounced differences were seen in smoking (caregivers were 30% more likely), hypertension (27% more likely), and poor sleep (21% more likely). Additionally, caregivers were 12% more likely to have diabetes and 8% more likely to be obese. Physical inactivity was the only one of the six modifiable risk factors examined for which dementia caregivers reported being less likely to engage in than the general population (9% less likely). "This analysis underscores the vulnerability of dementia caregivers," said Matthew Baumgart, senior vice president, Health Policy, Alzheimer's Association. "Dementia caregivers are often so busy caring for a family member or friend that they overlook their own health. This analysis should be a wake-up call for public health to develop strategies that address caregiver health to help this at-risk population." The analysis, conducted by the Public Health Center of Excellence on Dementia Risk Reduction at the Alzheimer's Association and the Public Health Center of Excellence on Dementia Caregiving at the University of Minnesota, found that younger dementia caregivers (under age 45) are particularly vulnerable to having modifiable risk factors for dementia. It found: Younger dementia caregivers are 40% more likely to have multiple risk factors (21.6% versus 15.5%) compared with all adults in their age group. Younger dementia caregivers were also 86% more likely to smoke, 46% more likely to have hypertension, and 29% more likely to report less than 6 hours of sleep per night on average compared with all adults in their age group. "By identifying elevated risk factors for dementia among certain dementia caregiving populations compared with the overall population, public health policymakers can prioritize and tailor resources and interventions accordingly," Joseph Gaugler, Ph.D., University of Minnesota School of Public Health. "Younger dementia caregivers, as well as American Indian/Alaska Native, Black, and male dementia caregivers, are all distinctly more likely to have conditions or behaviors that put them at greater long-term risk for cognitive decline and could benefit from additional attention." Previous studies have shown that caring for a person with Alzheimer's disease or another dementia can create new, or worsen existing, health problems for caregivers. More than 1 in 3 dementia caregivers say their health has gotten worse due to their care responsibilities, and more than a quarter of dementia caregivers delay or do not do things they should to maintain their health. The new analysis aims to spur public health agencies to address caregiver health and reduce the risk of dementia among caregivers. The new analysis examined data from the 2021-2022 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) to determine if dementia caregivers are more likely than the general population to have modifiable risk factors associated with dementia. Caregiving data from 47 states were included in the analysis. This work is supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of financial assistance awards totaling $6,307,435 with 100 percent funded by CDC/HHS. The contents are those of the Alzheimer's Association and the University of Minnesota and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement by, CDC/HHS, or the U.S. Government. About the Public Health Center of Excellence on Dementia Risk ReductionThe Public Health Center of Excellence on Dementia Risk Reduction translates the latest science on dementia risk reduction into actionable tools, materials and messaging that public health agencies can use. For more information visit or email CenterofExcellence@ About the Public Health Center of Excellence on Dementia CaregivingThe Public Health Center of Excellence on Dementia Caregiving offers technical guidance to, curates and distributes resources for, and brings together public health agencies, service organizations, healthcare providers, and dementia caregivers. For more information visit View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Alzheimer's Association Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
