A nine-year-old autistic boy in a suburb north of Houston has begun yelling that he no longer wants to attend school. Amber Knapek, his mother, has been witnessing this and experiencing a particular kind of helplessness—the kind that results from knowing that the system isn’t working for your child and not knowing what to do next. She submitted a voucher application. She didn’t fully understand the procedure. It was worth a shot, she reasoned. After COVID forced their two younger children out of traditional classrooms, R.D. and Julee Pierce enrolled them in a hybrid Montessori microschool in Spring, about forty…
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
A fifth-grade science class at Saddle Mountain Unified School District, located about fifty miles outside of Phoenix, had no teacher on the first day of the new school year. The instructor who was meant to be there had left the previous week to accept a higher-paying position in a nearby district. A paraprofessional intervened. Three more teachers had made threats to quit by the end of that first day. To put it simply, the district cannot afford raises. This is because Saddle Mountain incorporated the salaries of the mental health professionals it hired with federal pandemic relief funds—roughly $200,000 annually—into…