Some college basketball careers are appropriately celebrated while they are occurring, while others, like Brandon Clarke’s, only fully come into focus after they are over, when the distance makes things clearer and the loss makes everything heavier. Clarke only participated in three seasons of college basketball across two programs before passing away on May 11, 2026, at the age of twenty-nine. What most players accomplish in four seasons is completely different from what he accomplished in those three. If you’re not paying attention, it’s easy to miss the story’s beginning. After moving to Phoenix from Vancouver when he was a…
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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Strongsville, Ohio, nearly perfectly embodies a certain type of American suburb that appears to be fully settled from the outside, complete with well-maintained front yards, excellent schools, and Friday night football under stadium lights. Located in Cuyahoga County, roughly twenty miles southwest of Cleveland, it’s the kind of place where people relocate to provide a steady, predictable future for their children. With its forest green and white hues and almost 1,900 students passing through its hallways every day, Strongsville High School—home of the Mustangs—has long been a part of that promise. U.S. News ranked it 52nd in Ohio and named…
Lewis Waters was his name. He was a sixth-form student at The Henley College in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. The college is located in one of the more subdued, affluent market towns in England, just a short distance from the river, where people still live at a leisurely pace. Lewis passed away last week from meningitis. He was a young man. Additionally, his death, which came as a surprise to a community that had no reason to anticipate it, has left behind the unique kind of grief that small institutions experience—the kind where everyone is familiar with the name. The situation grew…
The architecture alone captivates the imagination when strolling around the Hyde Park campus of UChicago on any given afternoon. It has always seemed to be intended for a particular type of student because of the Gothic stone buildings, the quiet intensity of students moving between Regenstein Library and the quads, and the feeling that serious intellectual work is taking place somewhere just behind every door. the intelligent, motivated, and inquisitive. Despite its own declared ideals, it hasn’t always felt like it was made for the child from a family with an annual income of $80,000 who never thought such a…
The idea of extracting drinking water from desert air seems almost counterintuitive. Every instinct tells you that there is no water when you stand in the Atacama in northern Chile, one of the world’s driest landscapes. Bone-pale is the ground. To an uncomfortable extent, the sky is clear. However, water is present. dissolved subtly into the atmosphere, in quantities that far exceed most people’s perceptions of what is truly present in a desert. The existence of the water has never been a question. The question has always been whether anyone could create something useful enough to be released. Researchers at…
On the outskirts of Villavicencio, past the Caracolí condominium, a school sits on a piece of land that gradually opens up as you approach it, a few hundred meters down a road that doesn’t announce anything noteworthy. There are sports courts. There are green areas on both sides. Children move freely between the classroom and the outdoors, which makes it seem more like a planned part of the day than recess. The first thing you should know about Stanford School is that it has nothing to do with the California university, aside from the fact that they both have aspirations…
Seeing a man who once dunked on the entire NBA realize that he actually needed more homework is subtly amazing. Shaquille O’Neal received his fifth degree overall on May 16, 2026, when he crossed a stage at Louisiana State University to accept a Master of Liberal Arts degree. His name, “Shaquille ‘I Hate Charles Barkley’ O’Neal,” was called by the announcer, and the crowd seemed to enjoy every moment of it. That is very Shaq. The man manages to make a moment into theater even while wearing a cap and gown. Beneath the joke, however, is something that merits more…
The operations of one of the state’s more ambitious public school systems are discreetly housed in a modest administrative complex named for Lillie Delgado at 1311 Round Rock Avenue in Round Rock, Texas. It doesn’t make an announcement from the outside. Inside, a district that serves about 46,000 students in 60 schools operates with a level of structured complexity that most people only become aware of when something goes wrong. This has long been the practice of the Round Rock Independent School District. Founded in May 1913 after Williamson County authorized the establishment of what was then a two-school organization,…
Imagine a Tuesday afternoon in 2008 or 2009 at Las Vegas High School. Aluminum bats ringing out against fastballs, dry desert heat looming over the fields, and somewhere in the middle of it all was a sixteen-year-old outfielder who didn’t quite belong there. Not because he caused problems. Because everyone who saw him knew that he was just too good. By design, Bryce Harper’s tenure at Las Vegas High School was brief but had a significant impact. He hit numbers while playing for the Wildcats that made scouts gasp.625 in a single season, including five strikeouts, 36 base steals, 14…
When those in charge of schools, which are meant to serve as models of accountability, fairness, and order, consistently fail at all three, a certain kind of frustration develops. One of the biggest public school systems in Louisiana, Lafayette Parish School System, is currently experiencing that kind of frustration. Almost thirty thousand pupils. over 4,000 workers. Additionally, the organization that supports them both appears to have lost focus at some point. Comeaux High School has been the most obvious flashpoint. When the Lafayette Parish School Board decided to close the school in March, students protested by pouring out into the…