When you walk into practically any Planet Fitness on a weekday morning in July, the atmosphere is different from the rest of the year. The people using the treadmills don’t exactly resemble the regulars; they’re younger, a little unsure of where to begin, and some are obviously learning how to use the equipment for the first time. It’s not a coincidence. The High School Summer Pass will make a comeback in 2026. Teens between the ages of 14 and 19 will have free gym access at more than 2,700 locations across the US and Canada from June 1 through August…
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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This story can also have a quiet conclusion. After completing his senior year at Norman High School and accepting the only Division I scholarship offer available, a tall, athletic child in Norman, Oklahoma, fades into the comfortable obscurity that envelops the majority of college football players who were never heavily recruited. His name might not have been known to anyone outside of central Oklahoma. That was not the case. However, it nearly did. George Kittle moved through Iowa City and Cedar Falls during his father’s coaching career before transferring to Norman High School as a sophomore. Apart from anything athletic,…
Students who have even briefly strolled around the Harvard Kennedy School grounds exhibit a certain quiet confidence. When you spend a few days in one of the most prestigious public policy schools in the world, sitting across the table from professors who have advised governments and graduates who now influence legislation, something changes. It no longer feels abstract. It seems feasible. The Harvard Kennedy School’s Public Policy Leadership Conference is specifically intended to foster that. PPLC 2026 is a fully funded four-day conference for undergraduate students who are seriously considering careers in public service, public policy, or graduate-level study. It…
Madison High School was in the midst of the type of week that school calendars were designed for, eight days before graduation. Five complimentary commencement tickets were being given out to seniors; additional tickets could be purchased for $5 in cash. Room 206 was set aside for the yearbook signing ceremony. Disneyland’s Grad Night was scheduled. The school’s website continued to count down the days until the May 27 ceremony at George Hoagland Memorial Stadium, with a happy banner that read, “From Learning to Leading — Madison High Grads Are Future-Ready.” Then Monday came. Madison High School, a 50-acre campus…
The school calendar in Bellbrook, Ohio, a small suburb southeast of Dayton, still centers on Friday night games and seasonal sports, with parents crammed into bleachers for events that most people outside the county are unaware of. Bellbrook Middle School is located on Feedwire Road. It is a peaceful campus with Zack Cline as its principal. The school day begins at 7:20 a.m. By all standards, it is not a location that makes headlines for athletics at the state level. Maria Boyd, an eighth grader, temporarily altered that last weekend. Boyd placed third in the discus and second in the…
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…
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…