Education

TOPEKA, Kansas — A few weeks ago, University of Kansas senior Fatimah Alsinan was in a workshop finishing the last design and construction projects for her architecture degree. Now, she’s meeting with classmates online, reviewing premade blueprints and building projects with K’Nex and Legos at her apartment.

Child care providers in the metro have been allowed to stay open in order to watch the kids of essential workers who still need to do their jobs. But advocates worry the child care workers themselves, many of whom are low paid and don’t have health insurance, are working through the COVID-19 crisis without a safety net. “It’s not a question of if somebody gets sick taking care of other people’s children, it’s a question of when,” said Melissa Rooker, executive director of the Kansas...

The spring semester is when most soon-to-be educators do their student teaching, but now they’re trying to figure out distance learning even as their own education has been interrupted. Moriah Stonehocker is in her final semester at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a student teacher at J. A Rogers Elementary in Kansas City Public Schools. “It's 2 p.m., so I should be at recess right now with my kids, but I'm here at home,” she said last week. Stonehocker has been with the same...

The fourth grader in Amanda Whiting’s chair had never been to the dentist, so she was a little nervous to be seen at the clinic at her school, J.A. Rogers Elementary. “We don't use scary terms when we are treating a kiddo,” said Whiting, the dental director at Samuel U. Rodgers Health Center, which runs the clinic for Kansas City Public Schools.

Negotiators for the Shawnee Mission School District and the teachers union are at an impasse and will now present their cases to a neutral party. On one side are teachers who feel overworked and underpaid. On the other side are school administrators who say the union’s demands will ultimately put the district in the red. It’s a dispute with deep roots in the Great Recession and all the years Kansas seriously underfunded schools, happening amidst a national conversation on teacher pay.

NEODESHA, Kansas — Three hundred middle and high schoolers filed into their school auditorium last week in the small, southeast Kansas town of Neodesha, uncertain why they’d been called there. They left cheering and hugging. Some of the older students were teary-eyed. College tuition and fees need no longer hold back graduates of this manufacturing community, about halfway between Wichita, Kansas, and Joplin, Missouri. A wealthy donor hoping to turn around the fortunes of his dwindling...

After counting out the last in a series of chest compressions, Harry Painter Jr. sets up a nebulizer and begins piping oxygen into his patient’s lungs. “Mr. Jones, you scared us there. How are you feeling?” he asks. The lifelike mannequin blinks back. Everything around Painter looks exactly as it would in a hospital, but this is a simulation room at St. Louis Community College’s new health care facility on the Forest Park campus.

Missouri students spending more money to earn degrees want to know they’re making a sound investment in their future. That’s why college administrators have started steering them toward in-demand professions like education and nursing, where they’re all but guaranteed jobs. It’s a pathway to get students to and through college with less debt when they graduate. But some students and professors say Missouri’s colleges and universities still have an obligation to provide a well-rounded liberal...

Middle schoolers in the Kansas City area are paying close attention to Greta Thunberg and other youth climate activists making waves across the world. They’re also proposing their own solutions for global warming. “I like to see kids taking action about what might happen in the future,” said Liam McKinley, an eighth grader at Chisholm Trail Middle School in Olathe. “I like to come up with random ideas about how we can fix that, even though it might not be achievable in the next few years.”

On any given weekday, University of Missouri student Jack Hale is working six to eight hours and dashing to class in between. “I wake up a little after five and I do not stop until 11 p.m. most days,” Hale says. Between a full load of classes and two jobs taking up nearly 40 hours a week, he barely gets enough sleep.

Missouri’s school report cards are out, and they don’t look anything like they did last year. The redesigned Annual Performance Report (APR) does away with the percentile score that the state uses to make accreditation decisions and replaces it with color-coded bar graphs meant to give parents a more detailed look at how their school district or charter school is doing. But educators aren’t sure how accessible all that information really is.

Across the metro, Kansas City schools are serving more students of color, especially Latinos, but that diversity isn’t reflected on school boards. Without representation, students of color can feel like no one’s looking out for their interests.

With college costs rising every year, Missouri’s A+ Scholarship Program is a bargain – 50 hours of tutoring in exchange for two free years of community college. College access advocates, however, argue that the money isn’t going to the students who need it most. “We know there are people who utilize A+ who come from families that make $100,000 or $200,000 a year,” said Karissa Anderson, the advocacy director for the Scholarship Foundation of St. Louis. The program doesn’t look at financial...

It’s the middle of summer but Harrisburg Middle School is a hive of activity. Between summer school classes and renovations, it’s a little chaotic for counselor Brett Rawlings, who just wrapped up his first year at the school. Harrisburg is a town of fewer than 300 people, midway between St. Louis and Kansas City. But the school also serves the surrounding area, which is primarily farmland. As the K-8 counselor, Rawlings is responsible for some 400 students, and he deals with a range of...

Kansas City’s first charter school for girls only opens next week with a staff that reflects the diversity of its students and the community. Kansas City Girls Preparatory Academy is entering a crowded charter market, but school leaders are counting on a curriculum that highlights the contributions of women and people of color to attract and keep students. Parent Monique Cannon decided to move her daughter, Dieerin Jamison, from another charter school so she could have more teachers of color.

Between the time they’re born and age 3, babies’ brains are literally mapping, making the connections they’ll need to learn later on. In fact, 80 percent of a child’s brain develops in the first three years.

For more than 100 years, Eudora had a weekly newspaper. “We were able to have a sports reporter, somebody that would come out when we had a structure fire and report on it,” said Mayor Tim Reazin, who moved to Eudora in 1997. “We had somebody that sat through the city commission meetings with us.” But since 2004, more than 1,800 newspapers have folded, a third of them in rural communities . Eudora residents lost their paper in 2008. Reazin says the result is citizens are less informed – and...