Author: Kelsey Myers

In Southern Pines, there’s a small gas station on U.S. 15-501 South. It’s a Circle K, the kind you walk by mindlessly. A man by the name of Jaquell Kelly entered, gave a dollar, and left with a Cash 5 ticket sometime prior to the drawing on May 13. A few days later, he was sitting in the Raleigh headquarters of the NC Lottery, taking home $93,613 after taxes. That had about a 1 in 962,598 chance of occurring. According to reports, Kelly referred to it as a “fluke.” It’s difficult to ignore the sheer number of people who stand…

A 1970 photo of Bill Gates reveals something significant about him. At sixteen, he is seated beside his friend Paul Allen at a Teletype terminal at Lakeside School in Seattle. They are both gazing at the machine with a level of concentration that is not performative. That terminal was purchased by the Mothers’ Club with money from a rummage sale. Perhaps no rummage sale in history has had more repercussions later on. Gates was raised in a cozy and competitive home in Seattle. The family played board games and cards with real stakes, and losing had repercussions. His parents desired…

On a Tuesday morning, you will observe things in a special education classroom that are not included in any policy report. The teacher’s desk was piled high with binders. The sticky notes that indicate incomplete IEP documents. With his headphones on, the student in the back corner appears to be focused solely on a screen. These seemingly insignificant details reveal a system that has consistently been underfunded and asked to accomplish too much with insufficient resources. But something is beginning to change. Artificial intelligence is slowly but surely finding its way into special education classrooms, and when it does, the…

You can learn nearly everything about Elon Musk in a single moment. The year is 1995. One of the world’s most esteemed universities, Stanford University, has accepted him into a PhD program in applied physics. After arriving and taking a look around, he disappears two days later. Not because he didn’t succeed. Not because he was incapable of doing it. since he had somewhere more fascinating to be. Musk has always viewed formal education as a starting point rather than a destination, as evidenced by that decision, which was both impulsive and obviously intentional. He was raised in a comfortable…

A school building that punishes its occupants has a very unsettling quality. Not in the dramatic sense of broken windows or crumbling ceilings, but rather through a more subdued and draining form of failure. The kind that appears every May, every January, and yet manages to surprise everyone and nobody at the same time. That is currently the Cardozo Education Campus in Ward 1 of Washington, D.C. Midway through May, classrooms are 95 degrees. In a heat that would cause most office workers to call in sick, students are attempting to focus during finals and Advanced Placement exams. While attempting…

MIT tends to produce a certain type of person. Not only are they technically proficient, but they are also constitutionally skeptical—trained to challenge presumptions, reject consensus for its own sake, and reach conclusions via a method rather than an emotion. Whether or not Thomas Massie is flattered by that description, it helps to explain him. Growing up in an Appalachian community in Vanceburg, Kentucky, where his father operated a beer distributorship, Massie’s aspirations weren’t necessarily focused on Cambridge, Massachusetts. However, he was able to attend MIT, where he graduated with a Master of Science in mechanical engineering in 1996 and…

If you walk into any good preschool on a Tuesday morning, you’ll see something that is often overlooked. The space is noisy, a little disorganized, and yet somehow well-organized. While kneeling beside a child solving a puzzle, a teacher speaks in a calm, precise tone that is neither hurried nor patronizing. The teacher observes another child watching something outside by the window without becoming distracted. All of this is not an accident. The person in charge of that room most likely has a degree in early childhood education, and most people outside the field are unaware of how difficult the…

A student may spend part of the morning in an archery class and the remainder of the day in a literature course centered around conspiracy theories at a school in Monroe, Washington, which is tucked away along Short Columbia Street. It’s not overstated. For families who are familiar with it, Sky Valley Education Center, or SVEC, operates under a philosophy that most public schools lack the structure and motivation to try: let students design their own education, within reason, and see what happens. It turns out that the school has a 77% student graduation rate, a ninth-place Niche ranking among…

When laws intended to protect people suddenly protect the wrong person, a certain kind of institutional helplessness takes hold. This is essentially what has been happening in Washington County, Tennessee, where a school board member who has been accused of assault continues to attend meetings, sit at the same table, and hold official office. The Washington County Board of Education is in a position that no one in that room on April 2 could have predicted, or perhaps someone ought to have given what is now known about Keith Ervin’s past. The actual event was caught on camera. After she…

Watching an American city in 2026 send almost 200,000 students home because their school buildings can’t withstand a hot May day is somewhat damning. Not in August. May. This week, the Philadelphia School District announced that 57 schools would switch to online instruction due to a heat wave that hit the area with a level of intensity that felt more like a reckoning than the weather. It wasn’t totally unexpected. The district’s Deputy Superintendent of Operations, Oz Hill, wrote to families on Tuesday night in the cool, collected manner that officials typically employ when making announcements that are actually quite…