School districts across the state began the 2022/23 school year with one thousand teaching vacancies according to data from the Tennessee Department of Education.

A new poll finds the unanimous rejection of new charters at the school board level this year doesn’t align with the values of Tennessee voters who elected them.

Rutherford County Schools (RCS) is recommending purchasing backpacks for participants in the upcoming June summer learning camp.

If it wasn’t for Ruby Bridges, Ben Williams’ circle of friends would be smaller — and whiter. That’s why, when the 11-year-old Grahamwood Elementary School student read about how Bridges endured death threats and racial slurs to attend all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960, he wrote a letter thanking her.

Tennessee is not expected to have many truly competitive races in the August 1 state primary, but one that will be is already seeing misleading campaigning and a formal complaint of “skirting” campaign finance limits.That race involves Senate Education Chair Jon Lundberg, R-Bristol, and his Senate District 4 Republican challenger Bobby Harshbarger, East Tennessee pharmacist and son of Congresswoman Diana Harshbarger, R-Tennessee.Harshbarger has attempted to run to the right of Lundberg and is misleadingly criticizing the Senator for the failure of legislation to ban pride flags from Tennessee classrooms.

The Memphis Grizzlies National Basketball Association (NBA) team is providing a donation to provide students at Fox Meadows Elementary and John P. Freeman Optional School with an all-new basketball hoop system.

Knox County parents will be notified if their children are at risk of retention under new state reading requirements, with options for retesting or summer intervention.

Soulsville Charter School senior Elisha Muhammad says a high school internship set her on a new path to advocate for those trying to overcome systemic barriers.

Tennessee lawmakers and school board members have spent a lot of time over the last few months debating whether teachers should be armed, but a new poll finds the voters that elect them are much more concerned about schools than guns.

A growing New York nonprofit is using a newly released report to cement data around the axiom that social capital — or who you know — is key for first-generation college graduates searching for their first job.The report by Basta, an organization that connects first-generation college graduates with careers, tracks the experiences of young job seekers, revealing that not all networks are the same. 

Ben Frazier says traditional public schools have failed his autistic son.Frazier told members of the Memphis Shelby County School Board last week that his family has faced a lack of communication and accommodation at district-run schools, but everything changed when he enrolled his son at Wooddale Middle School.“When I got my child to Wooddale, everything changed. Wooddale is a family-oriented school. They take care of the kids,” said Frazier. “It’s a neighborhood school, they deal with the community. The staff keeps the parents informed, everything that I was not getting when he was not at Green Dot Schools, I’m getting now. My son is excelling, he came out of his shell, you can’t even tell that my son is on the spectrum because they have worked with him so much and I appreciate Wooddale so much for everything that they have done.

Two members of the Knox County Schools (KCS) Board of Education are proposing competing resolutions to push back on a recently passed law to allow armed teachers in classrooms.Board members Kristi Kristy, R-District 9, and and Katherine Bike, D-District 4, are each sponsoring resolutions to reject the legislation passed last week by the Tennessee General Assembly and signed into law by Governor Bill Lee. Both resolutions come to the same conclusion, but Kristy and Bike focus on different reasons.

Memphis-Shelby County Schools is asking the county for more than $200 million in funding for school buildings, both to address maintenance needs at existing schools and to support construction of two new high schools.The request exceeds even the expanded school buildings budget supported by a county wheel tax increase last year, and it’s not clear how much of it the county can provide. Projected costs for the two new high schools have risen by tens of millions of dollars since county commissioners approved initial funding for them.

Brittany Jones told members of the Memphis-Shelby County School Board her 13-year-old son has seen real change at the Memphis Grizzlies Preparatory Charter School.She says her son is autistic and she enrolled him there two years ago hoping the all-boys public charter school would be a good fit. Jones says the change has been so positive she’s supporting the school’s plan to offer a similar school for girls.

Tawanya Figgs says she felt her 11-year-old son Ta’vion Wilson needed a change going into his sixth-grade school year.Figgs says the traditional public schools in Knox County aren’t preparing him for high school and she’s been looking into private school options. Her search for an alternative ended after meeting staff at the new Knoxville Preparatory School.

The Memphis-Shelby County School Board unanimously approved an agreement Tuesday night to spend $28 million increasing teacher salaries.The historic investment will raise the average teacher with a bachelor’s degree’s salary by more than $4,800 in the 20224/2025 school year. Teachers with a master’s degree will average nearly $4,800 more, education specialists will see more than $6,300 more, and those with a doctorate will average more than a $9,900 increase.

Empower Memphis Career and College Prep will begin serving Orange Mound and South Memphis students a year later than planned.Chief Executive Officer Muna Olaniyi announced to supporters this week that the public charter school’s opening has been postponed until August 2025 because of facility-related challenges.

When E’Janay Reynolds was eight years old, she, her mother, and two younger sisters found themselves living in the Chattanooga Homeless Shelter for roughly seven months.Though her mother was eventually able to get federal Section 8 assistance to move the family into housing, this drastic change gave Reynolds a push to focus on school.“Academically, it just gave me a push to be better and do better. Because, if I didn’t do it, who else would have (done) it?” said Reynolds. “I just had to push to ‘okay, go in school, be the best you can be because you’re going to need that to get somewhere in life’.”

Daniela Castro Pu says the University of Tennessee Knoxville (UTK) felt like home almost immediately.Castro Pu is now weeks away from finishing her sophomore year at UT and she says the experience has been everything she’d hoped for but the ideal university match wasn’t always in the cards.Castro Pu says she might never have even considered the University of Tennessee if KIPP hadn’t offered a specific scholarship created for students like her.