Month: March 2023

When he’d go outside at recess, John Buettner would dream of learning the monkey-bars. The fifth-grader uses a wheelchair, so they aren’t accessible to him—in fact, most of the playground at Glen Lake Elementary School isn’t.
Meanwhile, Betsy Julien would look out from her classroom window as she ate lunch, at the students in their wheelchairs, and thought, “Our playground is not set up for everybody in the school to play and have fun.”
Julien’s own son is a third-grader at Glen Lake, in the Minneapolis suburb of Hopkins, and he uses a wheelchair, too. “So, this dream and passion of being able to have an accessible piece of equipment has been with me for a long time.”
Now, thanks to this teacher and her students, that dream is about to come true in a bigger way than she ever imagined.
Last fall, Julien and a few of her colleagues applied for, and won, a grant for an accessible swing and merry-go-round. The grant fell $35,000 short of the amount the school needed, and so Julien came..

Community colleges say they can’t help the neediest students get through college successfully without more funding. But these institutions, which educate 10 million students a year or 44% of all undergraduates, have a terrible track record; fewer than half their students end up earning degrees. Obviously, all those college dropouts aren’t improving local work forces. And state lawmakers aren’t keen to write community colleges blank checks without accountability.
The problem is that no one really knows how much it costs to educate a community college student, or exactly how much more should be spent on the neediest ones, from young adults who are the first in their families to go to college, known as first-generation students, to older adults who are juggling a job and children of their own along with school, often called “nontraditional” students.
A first attempt at finding an answer was the publication of a paper in October 2022 that examined the costs of Texas community colleges. ..

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters. This story was co-published with USA Today.
The data is in: More teachers than usual exited the classroom after last school year, confirming longstanding fears that pandemic-era stresses would prompt an outflow of educators. That’s according to a Chalkbeat analysis of data from eight states — the most comprehensive accounting of recent teacher turnover to date.
In Washington state, more teachers left the classroom after last school year than at any point in the last three decades. Maryland and Louisiana saw more teachers depart than any time in the last decade. And North Carolina saw a particularly alarming trend of more teachers leaving mid-school year.
The turnover increases were not massive. But they were meaningful, and the churn could affect schools’ ability to help students make up for learning loss in the wake of the pandemic. This data also suggests that spiking stress lev..