A picture of the gym wall, where retired jerseys and championship banners crowd the rafters in a way that feels more like biography than decoration, is circulating among Stevenson High School alumni. It’s not an official photo. Even though the building itself began with empty classrooms, no library books, and furniture that unintentionally ended up somewhere in Texas, that picture captures the essence of what this Lincolnshire, Illinois school has become over the course of sixty years. When Adlai E. Stevenson High School first opened its doors in September 1965, it had 467 pupils, 31 teachers, and no desks. The…
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
Read More
Somewhere in the history of high school basketball in New Jersey, there is a moment that receives far too little attention. In 1968, South Brunswick High School is defeating East Rutherford by a single point to win the Group I state championship in Atlantic City’s Convention Hall, which has over 12,000 spectators—an incredible number for a high school game. Dick Vitale, a young man, is the East Rutherford coach who is lamenting the defeat from the sidelines. He would go on to become college basketball’s most identifiable voice. Silently and without much fanfare, South Brunswick would go on to become…
Jalen Brunson once proposed to his high school sweetheart in a gymnasium in Lincolnshire, Illinois, a quiet, completely unremarkable suburb about 35 miles north of Chicago. On the same court where he had spent four years developing into something exceptional, he knelt down. It wasn’t a coincidental location. The story began in that gym at the Patriots’ home school, Adlai E. Stevenson High School, and Brunson seemed to know it. Before he scored 45 points to defeat the San Antonio Spurs in the 2026 NBA Finals, Brunson was performing in the IHSA at a level that most Illinois high school…
Imagine a group of three-year-olds on a Tuesday morning in January in a Norwegian barnehage. Even though the temperature is a few degrees below zero and there is snow on the ground, the kids are still outside carrying little backpacks, exploring the trees, and navigating icy areas without much help from adults. The instructors are not hovering, but they are close by. Letters are not being drilled. No one is being evaluated. According to Norwegian law, this is essentially what early childhood should entail. This is not up for interpretation under Norway’s Kindergarten Act. The national framework is clear: early…
The meeting takes place outside of a clinic. Usually on a Tuesday morning, it takes place in a living room with the family’s existing toys strewn all over the floor and a therapist sitting close by, observing. That’s where some of Minnesota’s most subtly successful early childhood behavioral health work takes place: a home visit, a camera running, and a parent learning in real time how to handle a distressed two-year-old instead of a waiting room with pamphlets. Programs such as the Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up model, or ABC, work on the surprisingly straightforward premise that the adult in the…
The annual tuition for a child between the ages of three and six at a Montessori preschool in the northeast is almost $20,000, and that’s for a day that ends at five o’clock. Most likely, it’s a good school. The fact that the teachers in charge of those classrooms at that school and thousands of others around the nation make a median wage of about $14 per hour is what sticks out, though. The numbers don’t add up, and they haven’t for a while. The childcare market in America is currently estimated to be worth $50 billion, which sounds like…
When a government official stands up at an economic summit and tells the audience that the system she is in charge of is, in her own words, becoming outdated, there is something subtly startling about it. At the 2021 Ehingbeti Economic Summit, Folashade Adefisayo, the Lagos State Commissioner for Education, did just that, and it was difficult to discount his sincerity. The majority of officials in her position would have discussed advancements. She discussed dysfunction. Nigerian graduates are joining the workforce without the skills that their jobs actually require, according to Adefisayo’s direct argument. She said there is a significant…
The edge of the Streeterville neighborhood, where Chicago’s medical district begins to assert itself in glass and concrete, can be reached by walking east from Michigan Avenue toward the lake on Superior Street. It’s difficult to miss the 625,000-square-foot, twelve-story Louis A. Simpson and Kimberly K. Querrey Biomedical Research Center, which opened in 2019. It was built at a cost of $560 million, and the way it connects to the current Robert H. Lurie Medical Research Center indicates that the school was considering scale long before that building was constructed. A large amount of the work at Northwestern University Feinberg…
On a weekday morning, if you drive down Laurel Canyon Boulevard, you’ll pass a campus that doesn’t make a big deal out of itself. No imposing gates. No billboard-style signage. It’s just a small school nestled into the hillside of Studio City that doesn’t reveal much about what goes on inside. That’s Campbell Hall, and the name carries a weight that the building’s exterior doesn’t really convey to anyone who has spent time in Los Angeles education circles. Initially operating out of a church building on Radford Avenue, the school was founded in 1944 by the Reverend Alexander Campbell and…
The series of events leading up to Austin Metcalf’s death on April 2, 2025, is extremely disturbing. Not because it was completely unpredictable, but rather because, looking back, a series of minor choices and institutional shortcomings came together in the worst way imaginable. In the middle of that chain was Karmelo Anthony, who had already received a suspension from Frisco Centennial High School prior to attending that track meet. Trial testimony revealed that the suspension had been imposed specifically for carrying a knife on campus. It’s not a footnote. It’s possibly one of the most crucial details in the whole…