The alphabet posters on the walls and the crayon drawings taped above the cubbies are not the first things you notice when you walk through a Head Start classroom on a Tuesday morning in a low-income neighborhood in rural Appalachia or Baltimore. It’s the noise, the focused, slightly chaotic energy of kids learning about the world at a speed that adults have largely forgotten. In a way, every game, question, and disagreement over a shared block is a neural event. During those early years, a child’s brain makes over a million new connections every second. When people hear that number,…
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
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The most recent Gallup data on Gen Z and artificial intelligence contains a certain kind of irony. The generation that learned to navigate TikTok algorithms before learning to drive and grew up with smartphones strapped to their hips is becoming more and more afraid of artificial intelligence. Not contemptuous of it. Not apathetic. Fearful, doubtful, and, if the numbers are being interpreted honestly, subtly incensed about the direction things appear to be taking. According to the survey, which was carried out in collaboration with GSV Ventures and the Walton Family Foundation, 31% of Gen Z respondents said AI makes them…
Bright students, serious research, and impressive grant totals displayed on departmental walls can be found in any major American biomedical engineering department. A clear, manageable route from the concept developing in a lab to the product arriving in a hospital ward is something you won’t always find. The industry has a term for that gap, which is large, costly, and annoying. It is referred to as the “translational valley of death.” Apparently, Scotland chose to fill it. An MSc in MedTech Innovation, a 12-month program that reads more like a structured apprenticeship in the entire lifecycle of healthcare technology than…
Every time the topic of kids and screens comes up again, one image comes to mind. Sitting at eye level with a camera and speaking slowly and deliberately to a child he would never meet, Fred Rogers was wearing that cozy cardigan. There are no jump cuts. No warning noises. There’s no countdown to the following video. It was just a man, a fish tank, and a subdued belief that the child on the other side of the screen was worth waiting for. It is nearly impossible to reconcile that picture with what most kids see on screens these days.In…
By American public school standards, a small rural school district in Louisiana took an almost radical action in January of this year. LaSalle Parish superintendent Jonathan Garrett declared that all 2,500 students in the district—from kindergarteners still learning how to hold a pencil to seniors in high school—would no longer be expected to finish homework. In that exact manner. Parents in nearby towns flooded the district’s Facebook post announcing the decision with comments asking, “How do we get our schools to do this?” It became the district’s most liked and shared message of the year.Such a response conveys something. Not…
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…
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,…