Seventh grader Tori Thain, 12, talks about chess with Bob Fritz, a resident at the Timber Ridge senior living community and a VOICE mentor at Cougar Mountain Middle School in Issaquah, Wash., on Oct. 30, 2025. These intergenerational relationships have been found to boost students' social-emotional skills.
Debra McAdams, executive director of the department of exceptional education at Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, visits Isaiah T. Creswell Middle School of the Arts in Nashville, Tenn., on Jan. 14, 2026.
The Fifth Ward Elementary School and nearby residential neighborhoods in Reserve, La., pictured here on Sept. 23, 2022, sit near a synthetic rubber plant that has emitted chloroprene, which California lists as a carcinogen. New research finds thousands of schools are located within a quarter mile of such environmental hazard sites.
Business students at the Donald M. Payne Sr. School of Technology in Newark, N.J., work in a computer lab on Feb. 25, 2026. A U.S. Department of Education grant was helping students in business and other fields at the school access enrichment programming, college courses, and financial support after graduation. But the department terminated the grant, along with 18 other similar awards across the country, last summer.
Enrollment in private school choice programs has grown quickly around the country in recent years. Applications open this month for Texas' newly created private school choice program, the largest such program in the country. Private "microschools"—such as the Humanist Academy in Irving, Texas, shown on Jan. 8, 2026—could benefit.
Juan Figueroa/ The Dallas Morning News via Tribune Content Agency
English-learner teacher Olga Dietz, middle, talks with Glenda McKinney, another EL teacher, in between classes at Mt. View Elementary School in Antioch, Tenn., on Dec. 3, 2025. Across the country districts are increasingly in need of these teachers with specialized skills for helping students learning English as the national EL population continues to grow.
Teachers utilize a team-teaching model that spreads out teacher expertise and facilitates collaboration at Stevenson Elementary School in Mesa, Ariz., on Jan 30, 2025. Some of those models depend on having coaches and interventionists—positions that risk getting cut during lean budget times.
