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…
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.
Read More
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…
Millions of American college students opened their laptops during finals week, entered their Canvas passwords, and discovered something unexpected: a ransom message that was injected straight into the login page informing them that the platform had been compromised and that ShinyHunters now had their data. It was likely the first time the majority of them had heard that name. It won’t be the final one. The hack began covertly on April 25, 2026, when ShinyHunters took advantage of a flaw in Instructure’s Free-For-Teacher service, which was essentially a promotional account mechanism that allowed the attackers access to a system that…
A staff member was selling homemade cookies to students in the hallways of Owen Goodnight Middle School on State Highway 123 in San Marcos, Texas, early on May 5, 2026. That’s the easy part. A quiet Tuesday at a small-town middle school became national news because of everything that followed, including the four students who ended up in the nurse’s office, the police involvement, and the cookies that are currently sitting in a lab somewhere awaiting chemical analysis. Joe Mitchell, the principal, acted swiftly. That same day, parents received a letter verifying that four students had bought and eaten the…
When you stroll around Northeastern’s 73-acre campus on Huntington Avenue on any given Tuesday, you’ll notice something that isn’t included in the rankings: the students moving deliberately between buildings resemble young professionals taking a lunch break rather than undergraduates. A few of them are. Because of Northeastern’s co-op program, which places students in full-time paid jobs at businesses for six-month rotations, a sizable portion of the student body is actually employed somewhere in Boston, New York, or occasionally abroad. The most honest response to the question that people frequently ask about this school is that tangible career orientation. Depending on…
A parent is most likely currently sitting at the kitchen table in a terraced home in Leeds, Bristol, or the peaceful suburbs of Birmingham, reading the specifics of a law that was passed this spring and wondering exactly what it means for the way they have been raising their kids. After passing Parliament over the course of more than a year, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 was given Royal Assent. Although it does not take away anyone’s right to homeschool, it does alter the environment surrounding that right in ways that the most impacted families are still adjusting…
On a school morning, you can still see students entering Paul Robeson High School through the front doors, carrying bulky backpacks, wearing headphones, and navigating hallways that have been traversed by generations of Philadelphia children. The structure has a past. The surrounding neighborhood also does. However, if the Philadelphia Board of Education has its way, those doors will be permanently closed by the 2027–2028 academic year. In late April, the board decided to close 17 public schools, including Robeson, which is not the only one with a significant name in this community. The vote itself was out of the ordinary.…
Imagine a preschool classroom in a remote part of Kenya. There is only one room, a low window lets in morning light, and a teacher is in charge of twenty-three kids, ages three to five, the majority of whom didn’t eat breakfast. The instructor has received some training. Not sufficient. The materials on the shelf are not in the local language and were donated. She is doing what she needs, which is more than the system has provided, and what she can do, which is significant. In more than 70 countries where OMEP works, as well as in several American…
A child is learning in a national language other than her grandmother’s while seated at a desk in a rural Indonesian school. The curriculum does not include her grandmother’s language, which is one of the hundreds of regional tongues that are still spoken throughout the archipelago. It might never show up in her formal education. The story is not exclusive to Indonesia. Every continent is experiencing it in communities where the rate of standardization has surpassed any significant attempts to maintain the unique characteristics of a given location, population, or custom. The Liechtenstein-based global education network EdHeroes is attempting to…
Imagine a kindergarten in a Sudanese refugee camp with plastic chairs, a tiny chalkboard, and a kid-friendly area funded by UNICEF where a four-year-old named Walaa is learning to draw. It is modest by all material standards. However, no amount of primary school remediation can completely replace what is taking place in that room—the development of language, routine, and the fundamental cognitive scaffolding that later learning depends on. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP, has been arguing this point for many years. At last, there may be a chance to make it matter at the level of…