Day: March 7, 2023

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
Before taking Arabic language classes at Denver’s North High School, Rachel Saghbazarian had to communicate with her grandmother in Lebanon using what she called broken English. Her father often had to serve as interpreter – and too many times, thoughts were lost in translation.
Now, a year after starting the classes taught by Mohamed Moghazy, Rachel hopes to be able to revisit conversations asking her grandmother — in Arabic this time — what it was like to relocate to Lebanon after fleeing her war-torn home of Armenia.
“I have been able to speak to my grandma a little more,” said Rachel, a 15-year-old sophomore. “She’s getting older and I’m not going to be able to talk to her forever.”
Rachel is one of about 30 students at North High School who have taken Moghazy’s Arabic language and language arts classes since they started last year. They include students like Rachel (the daug..

If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting 9-8-8.
The statistics are sobering. In the past year, nearly 1 in 3 teen girls reports seriously considering suicide. One in 5 teens identifying as LGBTQ+ say they attempted suicide in that time. Between 2009 and 2019, depression rates doubled for all teens. And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic. The question is: Why now?
“Our brains, our bodies, and our society have been evolving together to shape human development for millennia… Within the last twenty years, the advent of portable technology and social media platforms is changing what took 60,000 years to evolve,” Mitch Prinstein, the chief science officer at the American Psychological Association (APA), told the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. “We are just beginning to understand how this may impact youth development.”
Prinstein’s 22-page testimony, along with dozens of useful footnotes, offers some muc..

For De’Ana Forbes, it started with crayons, teddy bears, her baby sister and a baseboard-turned-chalkboard in Danville, Virginia.
Though today she’s a social studies teacher at Freedom High, a predominantly Black and brown public school in Woodbridge, Virginia, Forbes has been educating for as long as she can remember.
“Ever since I was 5 I felt like there was something that was in me to teach,” she says. “And not just to impart knowledge, but to nurture, to encourage, to support.”
According to Forbes, that nature is essential to navigating this month as a Black educator.
Black History Month poses a challenge to some.
The tradition–a contemporary evolution of Carter G. Woodson’s “Negro History Week”–could be seen as an opportunity to spotlight the solemn tale of Black American struggles. As such, February could lead way to a hurried, 28-day scramble to discuss all that’s happened to Black folks in America, from the transatlantic slave trade, to the Jim Crow South, to the Civil Rig..

Students’ race and ethnicity affect their chances of earning a college degree, according to several new reports on higher education released in January and February 2023. However, the picture that emerges depends on the lens you use. College degrees are increasing among all racial and ethnic groups, but white and Asian Americans are far more likely to hold a college degree or earn one than Black, Hispanic or Native Americans.
Earning a college degree involves two steps: starting college and finishing college. Before the pandemic, white, Black and Hispanic Americans were enrolling in college at about the same rates, especially when unemployment was high and jobs were hard to find. (Asian Americans enrolled in college at much higher rates.) The bigger distinction is that once a student has started college, the likelihood of making it through the coursework and tuition payments and ultimately earning a degree varies so much by race and ethnicity.
First, let’s begin with enrollment. Th..