Author: Kelsey Myers

Most mornings, a line of Denver Public Schools buses is parked along West 7th Avenue close to Federal Boulevard. The buses’ diesel engines are idling, their orange lights are flashing, and the drivers are memorizing their routes. Those buses were sitting motionless and covered in several inches of wet spring snow on Wednesday, May 6. For Denver Public Schools, it was the first snowy day of the academic year. Additionally, no one in the office was able to locate any documentation of a May closure occurring previously, according to district spokesperson Scott Pribble. “I can’t find anyone who remembers a…

On Monday morning, Foss High School’s hallways were unusually quiet. Four days after a knife fight left six people hurt, including one who was fighting for his life in the intensive care unit after having a portion of his lung surgically removed, students filed back through the doors, some with their heads down and others looking around. Outside was a Tacoma police cruiser. The building was filled with crisis counselors. In a technical sense, it was a return to school. The question of whether it felt like one is completely different. Named for Henry Foss, a tugboat tycoon and civic…

A May snowstorm in Colorado has an almost humorous quality until it becomes unfunny. Something changed on the evening of May 5, 2026, when temperatures throughout the Front Range had hovered around a pleasant and warm 75 degrees the day before. By the time the majority of households woke up, school districts along the corridor had already issued closure alerts due to the darkening skies and the moisture rolling in from the mountains. The phones began to buzz before the coffee had finished brewing. Local meteorologists dubbed the storm “Miracle May,” but depending on who you ask, it may have…

Depending on the length of the layover, the flight into Bangkok takes 20 to 22 hours. By the time the conference center—a sizable, climate-controlled structure in the sweltering July heat—comes into view, the majority of American attendees have already spent several hours wondering if the trip was worthwhile. Yes, it was. People who travel to an OMEP World Assembly for the first time seem to consistently report feeling a little sorry about the jet lag, which is quickly followed by the realization that nothing in their domestic professional lives had adequately prepared them for what a truly global conversation about…

Almost all American schools have parks close by. In the majority of them, kids spend twenty minutes outside each day; depending on the district, the time of year, and whether a standardized test is coming up, they may spend less or none at all. There is grass. There is the sky. There are trees. The American educational system has quietly decided that outdoor time is a reward for productivity rather than a developmental need in and of itself, so for a large portion of the school day, the kids are not. It turns out that this policy decision places the…

A four-year-old is currently being given a pencil in an American preschool classroom and asked to perform tasks that developmental science suggests she might not be neurologically prepared to perform. It will take about thirty minutes to complete the test. The results will be entered into a database. A number will appear next to her name somewhere in that database, and it will be used to make decisions regarding her placement, the assessment of her teacher, and, in certain situations, the funding for her school. She doesn’t know any of this. All she knows is that the person posing the…

Developmental neuroscientists use the number 1,000 to make a room quiet. In other words, during the first two years of life, a baby’s brain forms 1,000 new neural connections every second. Not every minute. every second. The architecture of the human mind is being constructed at that rate, which is unrepeatable and ends by the time a child turns three. Language, emotional control, the ability to trust, and the foundation of mental health are all shaped by what goes into the construction site during that window. What is missing—stimulation, safety, adequate nutrition, consistent, responsive caregiving, and freedom from chronic stress—leaves…

Imagine an eight-year-old boy showing up for school on a morning after a horrible incident occurred at home the previous evening. Perhaps he skipped meals. Perhaps he witnessed a family member being taken into custody. Perhaps because no one has given him the words to express it, he is carrying grief that is so heavy that it has no name yet. He takes a seat at his desk, fidgeting, preoccupied, and avoiding eye contact. Additionally, a teacher has quietly come to the conclusion that he doesn’t care about his work within the first hour. that he’s challenging. that he belongs…

Four months from graduation, a twelfth grader is sitting in a high school classroom somewhere in America right now, unable to demonstrate basic math skills. Not complex math. Not trigonometry or calculus. simple. 45% of American 12th graders fit that description, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress data. Almost half. In a system where the nation as a whole spends more than $857 billion a year—a sum that recently surpassed the trillion-dollar threshold when all K–12 expenditures are taken into account—that figure is the kind of thing that should cause someone to stop whatever they’re doing…

A truck carrying a Mazak Optiplex 3015 CO₂ laser, which can cut through three-quarters of an inch of steel with precision measured in thousandths of an inch, arrived at the Regional Skills Center at Columbia Gorge Community College in The Dalles, Oregon, on a snowy Friday morning in February 2025. It is not the kind of equipment you would find at a community college serving a rural area of north-central Oregon where the Columbia River carves a broad, wind-carved route between Oregon and Washington, but rather in a serious aerospace or automotive facility. In many ways, the whole story lies…