In her north London home, Maria Julia Assis was having dinner when her 6-year-old son ran into the dining room with a pale face. His Android phone’s puzzle game had been interrupted. A message from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs informing a first-grader in capital letters that those who cause harm will pay a heavy price took its place, along with footage of Hamas militants, scared Israeli families, and blurry graphic images. Assis immediately erased the game. She claimed that her son was shaken. He questioned the purpose of a graphic advertisement in his game. The question was reasonable.…
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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In the midst of a worldwide pandemic on a soggy June day in 2020, a team of community organizers in Multnomah County, Oregon, had four and a half weeks to gather 23,000 handwritten signatures. They received more than 32,000. Preschool for All, arguably the most watched early childhood education experiment in the United States at the moment, was founded on that unlikely signature drive. Fifteen states have taken notice of the program in an attempt to determine whether Oregon has cracked a code that has eluded American education policy for decades. By the standards of American education funding, the plan…
Located in Fort Myers on Florida’s southwest coast, Florida Gulf Coast University is more well-known locally for its closeness to the Gulf than for turning out scholars with international recognition. When Dr. Jessica Essary became the first American in OMEP’s history to win the Global Educator of the Year Award, that changed, at least in some circles. This is the kind of acknowledgment that usually reaches Europe or Latin America, the regions with the strongest ties to OMEP. The fact that it ended up in Florida this time around speaks volumes about the direction early childhood education is taking and…
Delegates from one of the oldest early childhood education organizations in the world adopted a declaration in a conference room in Bangkok on a July afternoon in 2024 that did something truly unique: it informed governments that the childhood crisis and the climate crisis are not two distinct crises. They are identical. The 76th OMEP World Assembly Declaration, officially known as the Declaration on Promoting a UN Decade for Early Childhood Care and Education, came at a time when advocates for education and environmental organizations had been occupying adjacent but largely distinct spaces for years. Emissions, policy goals, and systemic…
A student is looking at a Bluebook screen with 80 questions ahead of them and a 90-minute clock running somewhere in a high school classroom in mid-May. This is AP Environmental Science, or APES as practically everyone refers to it, and the exam surrounding it lasts precisely two hours and forty minutes. Students look up that number first, and it is correct. The fact that those 160 minutes really feel different depending on which section you’re in is something it doesn’t fully capture. There are two separate parts to the exam. The first section consists of 80 multiple-choice questions in…
When you ask a junior in high school what the AP Computer Science Principles exam entails, they are likely to respond with something along the lines of “it’s two hours, 70 multiple choice questions, pretty manageable.” That response is correct. Simply put, it’s lacking in a way that usually surprises people when spring arrives and the whole picture is revealed. The AP Computer Science Principles final exam lasts three hours, not two. The 70 questions in the 120-minute multiple-choice section, which covers everything from algorithm logic to data analysis to the social implications of computing systems, are weighted at 70%…
In May, a certain kind of tension arises over a Texas high school baseball diamond. Every family in the bleachers is aware that the season is nearing its final, priceless weeks, and the stakes are high. However, most people weren’t prepared for this year’s tension to come from the paperwork rather than the field. Even though the regional semifinals have just begun, the 2026 UIL Texas high school baseball playoffs have already seen their fair share of drama. Grapevine and Centerville, the two reigning state champions, were eliminated from the postseason for fielding players who were not eligible. Before the…
You wouldn’t expect anything concerning to occur on Wootton Parkway on a Thursday morning. It’s a broad, verdant stretch of road that passes through one of Montgomery County’s more established neighborhoods. It’s the kind of place where parents drop their children off at the curb without thinking twice and where traffic is typically the biggest issue on a May afternoon. On May 14, 2026, that silence was broken in a way that left the community still attempting to comprehend what had transpired. After being attacked close to Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, Maryland, a 15-year-old boy was admitted…
At Watertown High School in Wisconsin, students were leaving classrooms one by one by four o’clock on Wednesday. They were carrying signs as they made their way to the sidewalk outside, where they joined a crowd that had grown to an estimated two hundred people. “Let them play” was the straightforward chant, and the scene was typical of student protests: sincere, a little disorganized, and more impactful than adults in positions of authority tend to recognize. The Watertown School Board had voted 7-1 the previous evening to forbid the Wind Symphony from playing an instrumental piece at their spring concert.…
A student named Charisma Edwards received a $40,000 scholarship check from the College Board’s BigFuture Scholarships program on April 28 in front of her family, classmates, and administrators at Loy Norrix High School in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The kind of moment that is captured on camera, shared, and discreetly added to the list of things that appear too good to be true. There was no need for an essay. GPA is not required. No score cutoff. She was holding a check that would significantly alter her college options because she had followed instructions in an app. The majority of the students…