Day: June 7, 2023

Going into his last tennis match of the school year, high school senior Lorris Nzouakeu knew he might get knocked out in straight sets. He was scheduled for one of the first matches of the day during the regionals competition in western Maryland, against a student from another school who’d won the championship last year.
“So it wasn’t really looking good at the start,” he laughs. “My goal was definitely to continue rallies and maintain pace and also just have fun.”
“Fun” is sometimes hard to find in high school sports. Gunning for college athletic scholarships, many students and families go all in – focusing on one sport and even one position from elementary school. It’s also big business – the whole youth sports industry is worth $19 billion dollars, more than the NFL.
For a lot of kids of all ages, sports are not working for them. Less than half of kids play sports at all, and those that do only stick with it for about three years and quit by age 11. That’s a whole lot of kids mis..

This opinion column about climate solutions in higher ed was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
Climate change is here, now, lapping at the walls of higher education — quite literally.
Nathalie Saladrigas is an undergraduate at Miami Dade College, where her off-campus housing regularly floods. “You can’t even leave your car in the parking lot because it will get flooded — I mean up to your knees flooded,” she told me.
And 1,400 miles northeast, the campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook has also flooded, thanks to Hurricane Ida, a 2021 storm strengthened by climate change that cut across the continent all the way from the Gulf Coast to the Northeast. Maurie McInnis, president of SUNY-Stony Brook, vividly remembers the stresses of that fall semester’s opening. “A big rainstorm, and all of a sudden we had to find beds for 400 students,..