Alexa Guynes didn’t expect to win an award when she walked into her school gymnasium Thursday but that’s exactly happened.Surrounded by her 5th grade students at Germantown Municipal Schools' Dogwood Elementary, Guynes was surprised to hear her name read as the winner of the prestigious Milken Educator Award.  It’s one of the highest honors in education and has been referred to as the “Oscars of Teaching” by Teacher Magazine.

Nashville Mayor John Cooper announced a plan Wednesday to provide every district run public high school athletic program with new or improved sports fields.The announcement is part of a $15 million partnership with the Tennessee Titans and the Foundation for Athletics in Nashville Schools, Inc. (The Fans Inc), a non-profit organization dedicated to endowing athletic programming at Metro Nashville Public Schools.

Homelessness among Memphis-Shelby County Schools students has hit its highest level in at least four years, more than doubling from the same time last year.New district data shows 1,504 students were identified as homeless as of Oct. 7, the end of the first quarter of the school year. That’s a nearly 180% increase from last fall, when the number of homeless students stood at 538.

The Memphis-Shelby County Schools board wouldn’t select the next leader of Tennessee’s largest school district until July — a month before the 2023-24 school year begins — under a proposed superintendent search timeline.The timeline, presented to the MSCS board during committee meetings Monday afternoon, calls for the board to spend several months gathering community feedback through four public input sessions, a student input session, and a survey of stakeholders including parents, educators, and business and nonprofit leaders across Shelby County.

Althea Greene understands the assignment.Memphis-Shelby County Schools is in a moment of major transitions. The school board is preparing to embark on its first nationwide superintendent search in a decade — over two months after the school board cut ties with former Superintendent Joris Ray, who had been under investigation over claims he abused his power and violated district policies.

As the Memphis-Shelby County Schools board prepares to launch its first national superintendent search in a decade, Charles Lampkin has several thoughts on the qualities he wants to see in the next leader.Lampkin, the father of three MSCS students, thinks the next superintendent should prioritize transparency and be dedicated to rebuilding trust within the community. They should “keep a finger on the pulse” of the district, Lampkin said, and provide greater operations oversight.

The Memphis-Shelby County School Board will look nationwide for a replacement for its former scandal-plagued superintendent Joris Ray. The search will begin this month.“The MSCS Board will kick off a national search for a new superintendent this month with a vote to launch an RFP [Request for Proposals] to find a search firm,” board chair Althea Greene tweeted on Friday. “From there, we can hire a firm, engage the community and recruit candidates. We expect to name a new superintendent by the end of 2022-23.”

Reading champion Tallen Haag’s love of books might actually have its beginnings in her mother’s search for a new house.Stacey Haag says she had one very important prerequisite for any home she considered buying.“We have a whole library in our home. When I bought my house, the requirement was it had to have a library and if it didn’t have a library it had to have a place for a library,” said Stacey Haag.  “We always made sure there were a lot more books than toys and there’s books on every surface of our house and it’s really about leading by example.”

Memphis-Shelby County Schools showed some of the country’s sharpest declines in math and reading scores on the test known as the “nation’s report card.”Results from the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, illustrate the pandemic’s devastating effect on learning in Tennessee’s largest school district, where most students are Black and come from low-income families who were hit hardest by the pandemic, and where waves of COVID infections led to prolonged stretches of remote learning.

For the second time in six weeks, a Memphis-Shelby County Schools official has been placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation into an employee complaint.The nature of the complaint against Yolanda Martin, the district’s chief of human resources, was not immediately clear Friday afternoon. The district declined to comment on the investigation, but interim Superintendent Toni Williams said in a statement that the district “investigates all employee complaints as we continue our ongoing efforts to emphasize integrity in all MSCS functions.”

The Tennessee Nature Academy aims to be Middle-Tennessee’s first nature-based public charter school but it’s a different type of green that could cause challenges at next week’s appeal hearing with the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission.Commission Executive Director Tess Stovall issued a recommendation against the academy’s appeal, citing a lack of documentation about how the school would acquire the necessary funds to operate and its proposed reliance on per pupil revenue by year three of operation.

Jeffrey Stubblefield didn’t spend his summer break like most elementary school children.  Then again, Stubblefield is no ordinary fourth grader.From May 31 to August 8 this summer Stubblefield spent an astonishing 30,150 minutes reading.  That adds up to roughly seven hours a day with a book.

After three years at Germantown High School, Maya Logan has come to think of it as home — a place where she’s made friends who are more like family, that has helped her learn and grow in immeasurable ways. She dreams of being at graduation in a couple of years, surrounded by the friends and educators who shaped her high school experience.But that dream remains at risk if Memphis-Shelby County Schools and the neighboring Germantown Municipal School District can’t reach an agreement on the future of her school.

The Tennessee Charter Commission overturned MNPS’s decision to reject KIPP Nashville’s applications, approving two new schools in Antioch.

Three Memphians have thrown their hat in the ring to fill the District 7 seat on the Memphis-Shelby County Schools board vacated by Miska Clay Bibbs.Clay Bibbs had represented District 7’s southeast Memphis neighborhoods such as Parkway Village and Oakhaven since 2014, but she left the board in August after winning election to the Shelby County Commission, which will appoint her replacement.