Fatou and Modou have two healthy children. A 5-year-old boy who likes to build Lego towers. A 7-year-old girl who’s into anime. With each parenting decision the couple has faced over the years — picking a religious Sunday school for their kids, setting bedtime — they have mostly been on the same page. But now,...

Momentum may be building toward a full school reopening this fall, but some families say it’s too late. “My daughter will never go back to public school,” said Michelle Walker of McMinnville, Oregon, outside Portland. She took out a loan to move her fourth-grader MacKenzie into a private school and is working to mobilize families...

Friday’s updated school reopening guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts districts in a tough spot — do they require all students to wear masks indoors or just those who haven’t been vaccinated? District leaders say it would be difficult to implement a policy where masks are optional for some but not...

Data released last month revealed a startling decline in the number of American children attending public schools: Total K-12 enrollment dropped by roughly 3 percent in 2020-21 compared with the previous school year. The overall number obscures an even more dramatic drop among the youngest children. According to the data circulated by the National Center for...

This article originally appeared at El Paso Matters For the first time in her life, Giselle Paredes needs help feeding her family. “Many times I don’t have something to cook so I’m like, ‘what am I going to do?’” Paredes said. “They’re hungry because they’re studying.” The 45-year-old wife and mother of two says she has...

The highly contagious Delta COVID variant quickly spreading through the U.S. may force schools to double down on mitigation measures in order to reopen safely later this summer and into the fall, health experts say. It’s “one of the most dangerous time periods [in the pandemic] for people who aren’t vaccinated,” said Taylor Nelson, a...

James Smith missed his final housing payment to the University of Massachusetts Amherst when he spent a year there in an exchange program on his way to a degree at the University of Minnesota. Strapped and with his family struggling financially at the time, he promised to pay off the $2,000 balance as soon as...

To learn the geometric concept of transformations this year, Crystal Watson’s eighth-graders drew up blueprints of apartments. As they worked, she asked them to imagine designing affordable housing for Black and Hispanic families like theirs in Cincinnati who have been priced out of their neighborhoods. But when she had them add a hallway down the...

Restaurants and airports may be filling up again as the pandemic eases, but not college campuses. The continued steep drops in college enrollment, especially at community colleges which attract disproportionate numbers of low-income and minority students, are both surprising and worrisome. This spring, overall college enrollment fell by 603,000 students, from 17.5 million to 16.9...

As young people continue to line up for coronavirus shots, the gender breakdown appears, well, surprisingly even. Compared to a persistent gap between adult men and women in vaccination rates, with women rolling up their sleeves considerably more than men nationwide, early data indicate that the split has been far less pronounced among youth. In...