At pickup, it usually begins with a rumor. At a board meeting, someone’s neighbor overheard something. A Facebook group comes to life. Then parents receive an official, clipped letter telling them that the school their child has been attending for three years is, in effect, no longer their school. The address is still the same. The family has not relocated. However, everything on a map changes along with the line. This is currently taking place in cities and suburbs all over the nation, and if you’re not nearby, it’s easy to underestimate its scope. Boundary changes affecting schools from Bloomingdale…
Author: Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers is a Senior Editor at worldomep.org and a dedicated advocate for early childhood education whose work begins — and ends — with a simple belief: that the earliest years of a child's life matter more than almost anything else we can invest in. Based at a local school, Kelsey works daily alongside the children and families whose experiences inform everything she writes. She doesn't observe early education from a distance. She is inside it — in the classrooms, on the playgrounds, in the conversations between teachers and parents that shape how young children understand the world around them. That proximity gives her writing a warmth and specificity that purely policy-driven commentary rarely achieves. Through her writing at worldomep.org, Kelsey brings that same energy to readers — making the case, clearly and consistently, that early childhood education deserves far more attention than it typically receives. Kelsey shares her personal opinions on: https://x.com/Butterflyboule
Read More
There doesn’t seem to be anything noteworthy going on at the Toros Social Facility in Konak. However, this spring, more than 200 kids from neighborhoods in Karabağlar, Seferihisar, and Menderes—areas still reeling from last summer’s wildfires that destroyed about 30,000 hectares of İzmir’s surrounding land—gathered for workshops that most school districts, whether American or not, have never considered providing. In 2026, Türk Henkel’s “Leave a Mark” project arrived in İzmir with a structure that is both unusually thoughtful and deceptively simple. Children aged 8 to 12 participated in a series of workshops that included upcycling and recycling, nature-empathy exercises through…
The fact that it took place in Tucson is telling in some way. Not in a glass-tower conference hotel in San Francisco or a vast convention center in Chicago, but inside the University of Arizona’s Health Sciences Innovation Building—a name that, for once, truly reflected what was happening inside. By most accounts, the Arizona ACS Chapter’s 2025 Annual Meeting, which attracted 56 members—including 21 trainees—punched well above its weight class. Smaller regional events like this one might accomplish something that large national conferences can’t quite match: they compel attendees to stay in one place long enough to engage in meaningful…
A few state capitals are currently experiencing something subtly out of the ordinary. Three U.S. governors have started using OMEP’s child rights framework to change how their states define, finance, and legally safeguard early childhood education. These governors are working independently in states with disparate political cultures and financial realities. It’s the type of policy development that doesn’t make a lot of noise in Washington. However, those who are interested in education law have begun to take notice. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP, has long maintained that early childhood care and education are rights rather than…
Marie Fridberg enters policy rooms that were never intended for discussions about kids playing in the mud. She speaks on behalf of OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, and as time has gone on, she has started to feel a little awkward in government talks about early childhood development. It’s not because she is combative, but rather because the information she carries is difficult to dispute and even more difficult to act upon. She makes a straightforward argument. Youngsters, especially those under eight, require unstructured outdoor time. Not planned, not supervised, and not optimized. Just outdoors, exploring, moving,…
Four-year-olds spend their mornings in a specific type of forest in southern Finland. It’s more of a loose arrangement of trees, mud, and whatever the season has to offer than a playground. There is no lesson plan being followed by the kids. By purposeful national design, they are engaging in what Finnish early childhood education has come to view as fundamental: learning with their hands, outside, and in any weather. It wasn’t an accident. Someone wrote a resolution, which contributed to its occurrence. For decades, the OMEP World Assembly, which represents early childhood educators in over 70 nations, has been…
No one is surprised by Washington these days. The talking points have been practiced, the rooms are well-known, and the partisan tendency to look away as soon as the opposing side begins speaking has practically become automatic. Therefore, it was the kind of moment that people in those hallways noticed when a briefing on workforce economics and early childhood policy subtly brought senators from both parties into genuine, leaning-forward attention. The session, which was based on research from OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, focused on a topic that is often overlooked in the typical back-and-forth regarding childcare…
Warnings about children and technology are issued by international organizations in a way that seems almost routine. After a resolution is passed, a statement is issued, and a few headlines appear for a day or two, Silicon Valley’s machinery continues to function essentially unaltered. However, the OMEP resolution on digital childhood has a different vibe. Or it ought to, anyway. For many years, OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, has been raising concerns about the digital colonization of early childhood, frequently in partnership with UNESCO. Their stance does not stem from a fear of technology. The fact that…
In Umm al-Khair, the walk to school is precisely one kilometer long. It passes through a valley in the South Hebron Hills, a section of dusty West Bank land where Palestinian Bedouin children have been walking for decades with their backpacks bouncing. They arrive at their classroom in the same manner as children everywhere else: exhausted, slightly hungry, and somewhat reluctant. Then, under cover of darkness, settlers from the nearby Israeli settlement of Carmel crossed it with razor wire one night in April. The road was gone by morning. Since then, at least 55 kids have been unable to go…
A school uniform has an almost unremarkable quality. The black shoes, the pleated skirt, and the white shirt. On a Monday morning, you can see hundreds of kids rushing through iron gates with nearly identical outfits and bouncing lunch bags if you walk past any primary school gate. It appears well-organized. deliberate. Even safer. However, a significant study from the University of Cambridge is posing a question that directly challenges that neat image: what if the uniform is actually getting in the way? The study, which was published in the Journal of Sport and Health Science, used data from 135…