Norcross High School, located at 5300 Spalding Drive, hums with the regular rhythm of almost 2,400 students making their way through the hallways on Monday mornings as they head to first period and spend a few more minutes with friends before the bell rings. However, Monday of last week was not typical. A phone call that turned out to be a lie caused police cars to fill the lot, students to congregate outside in haphazard groups, and a strict lockdown to freeze the school.It’s worth taking a moment to consider that. An entire school day was disrupted, thousands of families…
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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Approximately 400 educators, researchers, and policymakers convened in Bangkok in July 2024 for what was, by any objective standard, one of the most significant international discussions regarding the treatment of humanity’s youngest children. They traveled from all over the world to attend the 76th World Assembly and International Conference of the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, including nations in East Africa and Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America, and organizations like UNESCO and UNICEF. Nearly none of it appeared on any American front page. It’s worth considering that silence. Three years after the end of a war that had…
Imagine a toddler in a living room somewhere, not in a particular city, but in the kind of setting that has become commonplace on every continent. The youngster is silent. The parent is appreciative of the silence. The tablet is operating as intended. There is no cruelty. No one is being careless. The screen is a workable solution for this specific afternoon because the parent is worn out, likely working, and possibly juggling three other tasks at once. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education (OMEP), which operates in over 70 countries and carries over 70 years of institutional memory,…
Approximately 600 people from all over Australia gathered in front of their screens on November 5, 2025, to participate in a free online symposium on early childhood leadership organized by Charles Sturt University. 600. That figure feels noteworthy for an industry that frequently finds it difficult to be taken seriously at the policy level and for a professional community that spends the majority of its time just maintaining services. This type of attendance indicates that the issue had been gaining traction for some time and that people were eager for a forum to discuss it openly. Leadership in early childhood…
A conversation has been subtly getting more intense in Buenos Aires at the modest administrative address where OMEP keeps its world secretariat. It’s about who gets to decide what the youngest children’s education should entail. The argument seems reasonable, even scholarly, on one level. On the other hand, it directly addresses one of the most unresolved conflicts in international education policy: whether universal standards for early childhood education can withstand interaction with radically disparate national contexts, political structures, and conceptions of childhood. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP, unites members from over 70 nations in support of…
During the pandemic, a mother named Anna Butcher in Morgantown, West Virginia, lost both her job and her daycare provider. When she finally returned to work, she claimed that the prices were outrageous for the area and that the nearby centers were at least a year full. In order to provide coverage for their young son at home, she and her husband now work two jobs, one full-time and one part-time. Her tale is not unique. That’s the idea. It is one of tens of millions of stories that all point to the same structural failure—the childcare desert—according to researchers…
Families will be dispersed throughout the Jefferson Elementary School campus in Carlsbad Village, California, on a Saturday morning in mid-May. It will feel just like a school, with kids running between activity booths, a mariachi group warming up near the cafeteria, and a folk dance troupe rehearsing behind the gym. Since the school’s Annual Multicultural Festival began in the 1970s, it has attracted alumni who graduated decades ago and predates the majority of the families that currently attend. The event serves as both a fundraiser and a statement for a Title I school in a beach city that runs an…
More than a dozen states have school buildings bearing the name Liberty High School, and each one has its own unique personality, hallway posters, and senior class jokes. The fact that the name sounds more like a proclamation than an address may help to explain why so many communities selected it. Beneath the common branding, however, are truly distinct institutions with distinct histories, pressures, and moments that define them to those who actually enter. The oldest is located in Brentwood, California, a city in Contra Costa County east of the Bay Area that has experienced significant growth since Edith A.…
On a chilly April morning, Brenda Lewis, the superintendent of Fridley Public Schools, stood with reporters outside the Warren Burger Federal Court Building in St. Paul and attempted to explain what her district had been going through. Situated in a community with a significant immigrant population north of Minneapolis, Fridley is a small district with approximately 2,800 students. Attendance in her district fell by 33% during the weeks of Operation Metro Surge in February 2026, when federal immigration officers descended upon the Twin Cities in a concerted enforcement effort. The district completely canceled classes on two different days in January…
Somewhere in the Jenks Public Schools Math and Science Center, there’s a poster that says “Bell to Bell, No Cell.” It’s been there long enough to seem unremarkable; it’s just a piece of furniture, one of those details in a school hallway that you only notice if you look for it. However, that poster and the underlying policy have evolved beyond a local ordinance. Oklahoma’s previously temporary school cell phone ban became permanent on May 7, 2026, when Governor Kevin Stitt signed House Bill 1276 into law. All Oklahoma public school students will not be allowed to use their personal…