A long-awaited solution may finally address school overcrowding in the Farragut area of Knox County.At Monday night’s school board work session, Knox County School (KCS) leaders recommended building a new K-5 elementary school to address the overcrowding in Farragut area schools. The proposed school is expected to cost $47 million and will house 1,200 students.District leaders also recommended spending $3 million to renovate Farragut Primary and Intermediate schools and expand both into K-5 elementary schools.

Tennessee House Republican leaders are close to approving rules for the legislative session that once again punish members for going off topic.The House adopted similar rules during last summer’s special session on public safety, leading to criticism when Republican leaders silenced Representative Justin Jones, D-Nashville, for going off topic.

Days before Christmas, the school board in Jackson, Mississippi, voted to close 11 schools and merge two more — a drastic move that parents in the district had long feared. Some on the list have lost 30% or more of their students since 2018.Despite the district’s high poverty, Superintendent Errick Greene said he could no longer afford to staff social workers and counselors at schools with long stretches of declining enrollment. Many older buildings were falling apart. It made no sense, he said, to have plumbers and HVAC technicians “racing hither and yon across the city” each morning to keep them running.

Whole-child education models are those that expand the ambit of schools beyond a traditional academic focus. While a range of whole-child models have been explored since at least the Progressive Era, use of these models has expanded greatly over the past twenty years

Tennessee lawmakers are returning to Nashville Tuesday to reconvene a 113th General Assembly that adjourned in April with more attention for its controversies than legislative accomplishments.The next few months of the session could bring more turmoil, with Governor Lee’s proposal to allow families across the state to use public dollars to attend private school along with the forthcoming Joint Working Group’s recommendations on potentially rejecting federal education dollars.

Tennessee’s learning loss in math could have a permanent impact on the lifetime earning potential of its students.That’s according to Dr. Eric Hanushek of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution think tank. Hanushek says students could see a 5.8 percent drop in overall lifetime earnings based on the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) math results.PISA is provided to 15-year-old students from more than 70 countries every three years and Tennessee students dropped 12 points between 2018 and 2022 on the assessment.

More than half of Tennessee tax dollars are going to education

When members of the Tennessee General Assembly convened the 113th General Session last January, ChatGPT was less than two months old.Today 100 million people use the artificial intelligence (AI) platform each week and it’s a leading part of the AI revolution that’s widely predicted to impact our daily lives. That’s especially true for life in the classroom, and Representative Scott Cepicky, R-Culleoka, believes artificial intelligence needs guardrails sooner than later.Cepicky’s is proposing a bill to require each university and K-12 school district in Tennessee to develop a policy for how both teachers and students will be allowed to utilize AI.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee’s proposal to allow families to use taxpayer dollars to attend private school is broadly popular according to a new poll by conservative think tank the Beacon Center.

Interim Memphis-Shelby County Schools (MSCS) Superintendent Tutonial “Toni” Williams says improving teacher retention could play a positive role in elevating low-graded schools on the state’s recently released School Letter Grades. The A through F grading system is designed to provide families with a transparent and concise picture for how well public schools are performing.Williams says the district will be taking a more holistic approach to retain teachers in the future, including preserving tutoring and small group instruction initiatives, adding more coaching for teachers, paying for education assistants to enter the profession, and giving veteran teachers longevity bonuses.

The conventional wisdom in some quarters is that the charter school movement has run its course. Abandoned by an increasingly progressive Democratic Party for being “neo-liberal” and by an increasingly populist Republican Party for being “technocratic,” charter schools (the story goes) are falling into the chasm that has opened up in the political center of our ultra-polarized country.But the conventional wisdom is wrong. 

While the entire United States is still reeling in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the recovery process has not been even nationwide. Many rural students and communities — especially certain pockets — are facing multiple crises in terms of educational loss, economic outcomes, unemployment and mental health.

The Tennessee Department of Education rolled out its much-anticipated School Letter Grades platform Thursday. The system is designed to provide the public with transparency into how well public schools are meeting state expectations by awarding each school with an A through F grade.Parents can use the dashboard to look up the letter grade for each public school in the state.

The Tennessee Comptroller’s Office of Research and Education Accountability (OREA) released a new report that found students who face language, disability, and economical challenges have significantly higher dropout rates than their peers in Tennessee.This disparity is especially a concern for English language learners (ELL) who have a dropout rate of 30 percent in 2021-22, exceeding the state rate by nearly three times.

The lengthy search for a new leader of the state’s largest school district is down to three finalists.Tuesday night members of the Memphis-Shelby County School Board named three out of state educational leaders to move onto the next phase of the superintendent search process.

A heated debate at recent Williamson County School Board meetings will be moving to the Tennessee General Assembly next year.Representative Gino Bulso, R-Brentwood, is sponsoring legislation to prohibit traditional public and public charter schools from displaying any flag in the classroom that isn’t the official United States flag or the official state flag of Tennessee. This legislation would effectively ban all pride flags in public schools.Representative Bulso told the Tennessean he was encouraged to file the bill by parents in his county and a school board member who were concerned about “political flags.”

The association that oversees middle and high school sports in Tennessee will now allow church-related schools to become members.The Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association’s (TSSAA) Legislative Council approved several changes to its bylaws this month, including allowing Category IV schools, which are church-related schools, to join. Previously, the TSSAA only allowed Category I (public schools), Category II (private schools), and Category III (regionally accredited) schools to become members.

One of the biggest challenges the next superintendent of Memphis-Shelby County Schools (MSCS) will inherit is the aging infrastructure of the district’s schools.The average age of school buildings in the district is 64 years old. That’s 24 years older than the recommended life span of school buildings nationwide and district is currently considering options to fund $500 million school upgrades and address the district’s deferred maintenance costs.With an eye towards this challenge, school board members asked each of the five semi-finalists for the superintendent position about their experience with facilities and operations Friday.Their answers could play an important role in the board’s decision tonight to narrow those five down to three finalists. Here’s how all five responded.

ParagraphLife has been busy for Muna Olaniyi ever since the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission unanimously approved her dream of opening a career based public charter school to serve families in Orange Mound and South Memphis.Empower Memphis Career and College Prep remains on track to open in the fall 2024, but Olaniyi says there are still a lot of important decisions to make before then.