Rutherford County is home to two of the top readers in the state.Smyrna’s Stewart’s Creek High School Senior Taylor Aslup and Murfreesboro’s Oakland Middle School sixth-grader Gibson Weber were among four winners of the annual Tristar Reads contest.

Parents and educators in Dickson kicked off a series of town hall events across the state Tuesday night designed to help the state grade its public schools.The Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) is hosting a total ten forums throughout August and September to fine tune the long awaited A-F School Letter Grades. When it launches in November, the new accountability resource will provide the public with a clear understanding of where schools fall on a grading scale in comparison to other schools.“What we wanna hear from you about is how do we measure a school’s academic progress. We’re thinking about developing a letter grade system for schools that’s really intended to provide parents and families with clear, understandable information that’s comparable across the state,” said a TDOE representative in the hearing.

Parents and educators in Dickson kicked off a series of town hall events across the state Tuesday night designed to help the state grade its public schools.The Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) is hosting a total ten forums throughout August and September to fine tune the long awaited A-F School Letter Grades. When it launches in November, the new accountability resource will provide the public with a clear understanding of where schools fall on a grading scale in comparison to other schools.“What we wanna hear from you about is how do we measure a school’s academic progress. We’re thinking about developing a letter grade system for schools that’s really intended to provide parents and families with clear, understandable information that’s comparable across the state,” said a TDOE representative in the hearing.

Members of the Maury County Public Schools Board of Education narrowly voted down a much talked about application by American Classical Education (ACE) to open the county’s first public charter school.

The halls of Cheatham County’s middle and high schools will look a bit different when students return August 7.  Students will no longer be carrying backpacks to class.

The approval process for proposed new public charter schools is about to begin its second round for school districts across the state.Four school boards will be voting on amended applications this month from nine public charter schools that were all denied in the spring.

Special needs students in Rutherford County may get to live out their dreams of becoming superheroes in the near future.At Thursday’s Rutherford County School Board meeting, The Every Kid Is A Hero Foundation presented board members with a proposal to give special needs students in the district a chance to become heroes in a comic.“What we have done, we’ve become a foundation called The Every Kid Is A Hero Foundation,” said foundation representative Lee Colvin. “Within this county’s school system, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to come in and we’re trying to work with the special needs high school programs.”

The Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) announced current Jackson County Schools Superintendent Kristy Brown will take over as the department’s new Chief Academic Officer on July 15.

Members of the Williamson County Schools Board of Education voted 8 to 2 to keep five challenged books on the shelves Monday night.Those books include Speak, Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Field Guide to the North American Teenager, Where the Crawdads Sing, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The books contain a common theme of the main characters being outcasts based on their own personal experiences and earlier this year, a district committee recommended against removing them from Williamson County School libraries.“A book that, in my opinion, makes a teenager kind of dive into and recognize that everybody is different and people at based upon their own personal experiences is a valuable piece of literature that’s a whole lot deeper than just the subtext or the specific sexual content, or bullying content, or drug content that’s being called out here,” said board member Eliot Mitchell.

State Senator Bill Powers (R-Clarksville) took an unconventional path to politics and the Tennessee General Assembly where he's the Vice-Chairperson of the Senate Education Committee.The sixth generation Montgomery County resident served as former U.S. Senator Howard Baker’s page as a teenager in the 70s but didn’t run for office himself until four decades later.  Baker served two terms as a Clarksville City Councilman before succeeding former State Senator and current Congressman Mark Greene in what is now Senate District 22.

A Tennessee school district has joined a growing list of school systems across the nation that are suing major social media companies like TikTok and YouTube over a crisis in student mental health.

Williamson County Schools Board of Education voted to give parents two notifications when there’s a request to remove a book from a school library.Last April, the board passed the first reading of a library materials policy that notifies parents after the board votes on  a challenged book.At last week’s meeting, board member Sheila Cleveland proposed updating the proposed policy to provide parents with an earlier notification.  Under Cleveland’s proposal, the district would provide parents an initial notification when the review committee makes its recommendation on challenged books.

School districts across the state should learn this week what students could be held back under the state’s new Third-Grade Retention Law.The Tennessee Department of Education expects to be able to send that information to districts by May 19. Districts will then check to see if any of those students meet exemptions to the new law and then inform parents.

American Classical Education (ACE) will open at least one public charter school in Tennessee, but the group’s controversial history remains a roadblock in several communities.This week five school boards voted on applications for ACE to open public charter schools with a classical education focus.  The organization received approval from Rutherford County Schools and came close with board members in Maury County Public Schools, but the group still faced opposition in Madison, Robertson, and Montgomery Counties.

American Classical Education (ACE) faced questions of providing misleading letters of support for a proposed new school at a hearing Friday with the charter review team for Robertson County Schools.

Before Justin Pearson was elected to the Tennessee House, before he gained acclaim for stopping an oil pipeline project planned for his neighborhood, he was a student in Memphis schools who wanted a textbook.Pearson, then 15, brought the issue to the Memphis City Schools board. The next day, the books were found sitting in storage. His principal was reprimanded, and district officials demanded that school leaders across the city prove that they had handed out textbooks.

The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee is offering students more than 150 scholarship opportunities to apply for, but the application is only available for one more week.The CFMT is a local nonprofit that connects donors with charitable organizations throughout Middle Tennessee and parts of Kentucky. Each year, the foundation administers approximately 160 scholarships to Middle Tennessee students pursuing higher education.

A new report from the State Comptroller’s Office found nearly $60 thousand in inappropriate fuel card spending by employees of the Cheatham County School District transportation department.Auditors didn’t specify how the cards were misspent or when the alleged spending occurred, but they do believe the misuse occurred because of deficient policies.

State Senator Dawn White was always going to make an impact on education. The Murfreesboro legislator says even as a young child growing up in Eagleville Tennessee, she was attracted to teaching. “I mean my mother will tell you the stories of when my sister and I would play when we were little kids, I would always be the teacher so it’s just something that I always had a passion for and a heart for,” said Sen. White. 

As instructional leaders in our district, we are fortunate to spend lots of time in classrooms. Cathy loves to share the story of popping in on one fourth-grade lesson to observe student writing. The room was cool, dim and quiet; the only sound was the scratch of pencils on paper as students brainstormed ideas for the poems they were going to write, a culminating task to wrap up an EL Education module on poetry. The teacher circulated as students pondered topics that were especially important to them — topics that were worthy of an entire poem.One word at the center of a student’s brainstorm was particularly striking: “education.”