Stephen White Eagle approached the Rutherford County School Board Thursday evening to fight for his son’s right to wear an eagle feather in his graduation cap.White Eagle’s son is a senior at LaVergne High School and he says school administrative staff and district administers told his son he wouldn’t be allowed to weather the feather because of school policy.

Tiffany Matthews says a team of teachers oversees her son’s individualized education program (IEP) for autism at Knoxville’s New Hopewell Elementary School.Matthews is grateful for the work they do, but she says those teachers are largely unsupported in their work, which includes making modifications.

University of Tennessee President Randy Boyd told members of the Senate Education Committee that there are three myths tied to higher education.Those myths are that no one is going to college, it’s unaffordable, and debt is inevitable.Boyd said the UT College System has seen total enrollment grow by 7 thousand students over the last five years and it’s planning to increase enrollment from 59 thousand students to 71 thousand students by the year 2030. 

Walter Blanks Jr. says his experience with public schools growing up in an economically disadvantaged neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio was hard.Blanks says he struggled to learn how to read and was bullied to the extent his mother feared for his safety.  That changed when his family took advantage of a school choice program that allowed Blanks to attend a private school.

Two years ago, Linton Beck unexpectedly suffered a cardiac arrest in his chemistry class.The Station Camp High School senior is alive today and able to talk about his experience thanks to the quick work of school staff and their training.Beck says a school nurse and teachers responded within minutes to perform CPR and a school resource officer restarted his heart with an automated external defibrillator (AED).

Eight State Representatives who currently don’t have public charter schools in their home counties played a crucial role in advancing a bill to support the more than 40 thousand students who do attend those schools elsewhere.Representatives Ryan Williams, Cookeville; Mark Cochran, R-Englewood; Jeremy Faison, R-Cosby; David Hawk, R-Greeneville; Patsy Hazlewood, R-Signal Mountain; Tim Hicks, R-Gray; Jerome Moon, R-Maryville; and Charlie Baum, R-Murfreesboro all voted in favor of legislation designed to provide better school facilities to charter students at Wednesday’s House Finance, Ways, and Means Subcommittee. The vote was considered to be one of the larger hurdles the bill will face this session.The legislation would require local school districts that have public charter schools in them to provide a list of vacant and underutilized buildings on an annual basis. Under the bill, school districts would additionally be required to make those properties available to public charter schools at a fair market value and give charters a first right of refusal for either purchase or lease.“There are school buildings that are also vacant or underutilized all across the state but often access to these buildings is extremely difficult if not impossible. Instead, charter schools in Tennessee must finance, locate, build, update, or renovate facilities to use as school buildings,” said bill sponsor Representative Williams.Supporters say the legislation will go a long way towards helping with the facilities funding gap charters across the state are facing. A recent report by the organization ExcelinEd found current state funding is only meeting 50 percent of charter facilities needs and this gap is expected to grow to just 42 percent of facility needs met in five years as more families choose to send their children to public charter schools.This gap also disproportionately impacts economically disadvantaged students and students of color because public charter schools serve a higher percentage of those student groups.Finding a building harder than finding staffThe challenge of finding a building is one STRIVE Collegiate Academy founder LaKendra Butler remembers well from when she founded her school nearly a decade ago in Nashville’s Donelson community. Butler says finding vacant space was more difficult than finding staff to work there.“There wasn’t a ton of spaces in this area that we could utilize so we had to be creative,” said Butler. “The search of a space was clearly impossible.”Butler ended up reaching an agreement to lease space in a building that used to be a hospital.STRIVE has since built out the second floor of the building to serve as a middle school but there have been obstacles to overcome, including a lack of outdoor space for children and classrooms with structural pillars in inconvenient places.Butler says it was luck that made the space possible.“We just so happened to communicate with a community member who had space. It’s not that we found the building, it was we found the person who then was like, oh I may have some space that works,” said Butler.The Tennessee Senate passed the charter facility bill earlier this month on a 23 to 1 vote. It now heads to the full House Finance, Ways, and Means Committee.

The timeline for Memphis-Shelby County School’s new superintendent to get to work is officially moving up.Members of the Memphis-Shelby County School board voted Tuesday afternoon to move Dr. Marie Feagins’ start date to April 1. Previously Feagins was scheduled to start after the end of this school year.

Dyersburg Middle School agriculture teacher Melissa Lowry told members of the House K-12 Subcommittee Tuesday that it’s important for her to be able to watch the kids in her class.This is so she can monitor them when handling dangerous equipment such as a table saw.“I have one set of eyes and right now they’re responsible for watching 25 kids. If that number goes to 35, my eyes can’t watch that many kids and so all of those opportunities are then taken away from them,” said Lowry.

The Tennessee State Board of Education is joining the list of government entities that have expressed an interest in changing the state’s new Third-Grade Retention Law.The board unanimously approved a resolution from board member Ryan Holt on Monday asking state lawmakers to reconsider the law and move back the grades where interventions take place to as early as kindergarten.

Members of the House Higher Education Subcommittee unanimously shot down a bill Monday that would establish prohibitions for public universities and other public institutions of higher education regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.Before the vote, bill sponsor Representative John Ragan, R-Oak Ridge, told committee members that DEI promotes discrimination. Ragan said his bill is designed to be colorblind and sex neutral.

Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) Director Dr. Adrienne Battle told Nashville business leaders the district’s recent national recognition for learning loss recovery followed strategic changes to better serve students.Speaking to the Nashville Chamber of Commerce Monday, Battle said the district has focused on key changes in recent years, including doubling down on the district’s Tier 1 instruction focus on high quality instructional materials and ensuring the district is operating with a common curriculum at all schools.

Future students of American Classical Academy Rutherford will begin school at a building just off I-24 in La Vergne.Leaders of the new public charter school announced Tuesday morning that 2 Ingram Boulevard in La Vergne is under contract and they’re in the process of purchasing the building.

The State Textbook and Instructional Materials Quality Commission is weighing whether classroom experience should matter more when it comes to reviewing textbooks.The commission is currently working on forming an advisory panel to review science textbooks under consideration for Tennessee schools. The commission selects members of the panel each year through an application process.

Incoming Superintendent Marie Feagins has started working with Memphis-Shelby County Schools under a per diem agreement, allowing her to begin a transition to the superintendent role while the school board hammers out her contract.Feagins’ temporary employment took effect March 1, according to a press release from school board Chair Althea Greene. Greene said she expects Feagins, a Detroit public school district administrator, to begin officially as MSCS superintendent on April 1, months ahead of the July 1 start that board members had targeted during the search process.

Tennessee Senators voted 23 to 1 in favor of legislation designed to improve the school buildings public charter school students across the state attend Thursday.The legislation would require local school districts that have public charter schools in them to provide a list of vacant and underutilized buildings on an annual basis. Under the bill, school districts would additionally be required to make those properties available to public charter schools at a fair market value and give charters a first right of refusal for either purchase or lease. School districts would not be required to sell or lease buildings district leaders want to keep.

Lauren Herring’s daughter spent two years at her zoned middle school before being accepted into Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet School.Herring says she desperately wanted her daughter to thrive at her zoned school, however it soon became clear that her academic needs, which demanded more robust and rigorous educational experiences, would not be met there.

When Governor Bill Lee announced his Education Freedom Scholarship Act last year, he made it a point to say the Tennessee General Assembly would work some out critical details like whether participating students will have to take state assessments.That decision has led to three different versions of the Governor’s basic proposal to let up to 20 thousand families use public dollars to attend private school. That question about state assessments is a key difference in each.

Tennessee teachers could receive help with childcare under legislation that advanced from a key House committee Wednesday.Representative Scott Cepicky’s, R-Culleoka, bill would authorize school districts and public charter schools to reimburse teachers 66 percent of their monthly childcare expenses.

When Toni Williams took over as chief financial officer (CFO) for Memphis-Shelby County Schools (MSCS) in 2019, the district faced a $58 million deficit and had insignificant savings.Williams worked to change that while overseeing district finances as CFO and eventually interim superintendent. Tuesday night’s school board meeting brought more evidence the district is on a more solid financial ground.The district’s independent auditor Watkins Uiberall announced it anticipates the 2022/2023 district audit will have no findings indicating financial weaknesses or issues of non-compliance on financial statements. That marks the fourth year in a row with no significant financial audit findings.

Chronic absenteeism has been an ongoing issue for public schools nationwide and it only increased following the pandemic.LEAD Academy in Nashville was no exception.To combat the issue, the public charter high school took an aggressive and comprehensive approach by implementing a new set of strategies that led to a drop in the number of chronically absent students from 42 percent in the 2021/2022 school year to 22 percent last year.