A 17-year-old from Tulare County became the youngest person in history to pass the California bar exam, officials said this week.
Peter Park, who has since turned 18 and now works as a law clerk at the Tulare County district attorney’s office, passed the exam on his first try, the district attorney’s office announced in a news release. Park took the exam in July and got his results on Nov. 9. The previous record holder was 18 years old.
In 2019, Park started high school at Oxford Academy in Cypress at the age of 13, officials said. He also enrolled in a four-year law program at Northwestern California University School of Law under a state bar rule that allows students to apply to law school once they complete the College Level Examination Program, or CLEP.
Park took the California High School Proficiency Exam and graduated from high school in 2021; he then graduated from law school in 2023. He became a law clerk with the district attorney’s office in August.
“I am extremely blessed to have discovered this path, and my hope is that more people will realize that alternative paths exist to becoming an attorney,” Park said.
Park said that he aspires to be a prosecutor because he’s driven “by a moral obligation to uphold liberty, equality and justice in society.”
He was sworn in on Tuesday in Visalia as one of the youngest practicing attorneys in the state. He turned 18 in late November.
Eight teenagers have been arrested on murder charges in the violent assault of a 17-year-old boy in Las Vegas earlier this month. Investigators said the attack, which was captured on video, occurred in an alley a few blocks from where the suspects and victim attended high school. Carter Evans has more.
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Max Hightower, a senior at Sherman High School in North Texas, always loved theater. He sang in his school’s chorus and was in school plays but had never landed a speaking part.
Then, two weeks ago, he was cast as Ali Hakim, a leading role in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Oklahoma,” after another student was cut from the roster.
“It was just overwhelming,” the 17-year-old told HuffPost. “I was so excited. I ran and told all my friends.”
But that joy was short-lived. Max was called into the principal’s office on Friday, where he says he was told about a “new policy” stating that students could only be cast in roles that aligned with the sex they were assigned at birth.
Max, a transgender boy, would no longer be able to play the male part of Hakim. Local outlet KXII first reported that Max had been removed from his role.
When Max left the principal’s office, he saw a line of other students who had been cast in the musical and were waiting to get the same disappointing news.
“We just had this giant cry sesh outside of the choir room,” Max said.
Sherman High students and parents who spoke to HuffPost said that about a dozen students ― transgender, nonbinary and cisgender alike ― were cut from the show because their sex assigned at birth did not match the sex or gender presentation of the roles in which they were cast. Three parents said their cisgender daughters who had been cast in male roles or wore masculine clothing for their roles were cut from the show due to the school’s new rules.
Meghan Cone, the communications director for the Sherman Independent School District, told HuffPost that there isn’t a blanket policy on how students will be cast for future performances and that she was “unable to address the number of students impacted.”
“As it relates to this particular production, the sex of the role as identified in the script will be used when casting. Because the nature and subject matter of productions vary, the District is not inclined to apply this criteria to all future productions,” Cone wrote in a statement.
Like most plays, “Oklahoma!” does not note that sex should factor in casting.
The school’s performance of “Oklahoma!” has been postponed until early 2024 because the district learned about “mature adult themes, profane language, and sexual content” in the show, Cone said, adding that the district is working to produce a version that is “appropriate for the high school stage.” The musical revolves around two fiery love triangles against the backdrop of Oklahoma’s journey to statehood, but Sherman families said the school has put on the musical in the past without any issues.
“It’s very clear to us and all the other parents and families that this isn’t an issue about ‘Oklahoma!’ itself or the content of the show,” Kayla Brooks, who said her daughter lost her part, told HuffPost. Her daughter had been cast as a male ensemble character in August.
“This is an issue about a trans kid who got cast as one of the lead roles,” Brooks said.
“I am really disappointed that the school district didn’t take the opportunity to educate the concerned person about gender-blind casting and the history of theater.”
– parent Betty Price
CJ Price, a senior at Sherman High who was also removed from her part, said that she and some of her cisgender female cast mates were told they could no longer participate because they preferred to dress as cowboys instead of wearing dresses.
Students said they were told that they would be recast in new roles that align with the school’s casting rules.
Cone said she did not know why some cisgender female students were cut for playing male roles or wearing typically masculine clothing but that the “sex of the role as identified in the script” would be used when recasting. “No recasting has occurred at this time,” she said.
Max’s dad, Phillip Hightower, said the school had been fairly supportive of his son’s transition — Max had, for example, worn slacks and a black tie when performing in concerts — and that he was “so taken aback” when he received a separate call from the principal informing him of the school’s decision to remove his son from the role.
Some parents told HuffPost that they suspect a community member complained to the school district after Max was cast as a lead, and they said they plan to raise the issue at the school board meeting next week.
“I am really disappointed that the school district didn’t take the opportunity to educate the concerned person about gender-blind casting and the history of theater,” said Betty Price, CJ’s mom. “But instead of doing that, they had a knee-jerk reaction and decided to make a policy change that has now forever ruined the history of theater at Sherman High School.”
Christina Shelton, the mother of an another transgender student, said she’s waiting to find out if a production her child is involved with will be similarly affected. Shelton’s child is in the school’s University Interscholastic League theater program, a statewide organization that brings schools together in competition.
“Is this politically motivated? Is this religiously motivated? What are you supposed to tell your kids?” Shelton told HuffPost. “It’s just not a friendly place for LGBTQ students.”
Phillip Hightower said he has been closely following how far-right forces have taken over a school district in Grapevine, just an hour south of Sherman, over the last year — including accusing a top-rated queer teacher of “grooming” students.
“That is the atmosphere we’re living in. I feel like the same thing could happen here,” he said, noting that he thinks his district has adopted more extreme and explicitly Christian policies recently.
Texas’ Republican-controlled legislature has introduced more than 140 anti-LGBTQ+ bills this year, according to Johnathan Gooch, the communications director at Equality Texas. Seven such bills have passed, he said, and have caused significant harm to trans and queer kids, including restricting access to gender-affirming care.
“I think it’s important to state blatantly it is illegal to discriminate against anyone based on their sexual orientation or gender identity under federal civil rights law, specifically Title IX,” Gooch told HuffPost.
Title IX is a civil rights law that bars sex-based discrimination, which includes protections for transgender students in any school or educational program that receives federal funding.
“It’s a difficult time to be queer in Texas, and schools need to be safe havens for these kids. It’s important that our schools affirm young trans kids, support them, encourage them in the arts and in their school work,” Gooch said. “These policies are just piling on, creating toxic climates that only further harm young people in the state.”
The phrase one percentcould be used to describe Doug Burgum’s socioeconomic status and, less gloriously, his national-polling average. On a recent Thursday night in New Hampshire, the North Dakota governor squared up to the reality of his presidential campaign: “The first question I get is ‘When are you going to drop out?’”
He was speaking to about 100 people in a private back room at Stark Brewing Company, in downtown Manchester. Republicans had come together to celebrate the state GOP’s 170th birthday, sheet cake and all. Burgum was the biggest star on the program, along with former Representative Will Hurd, who was a no-show after ending his own campaign three days earlier. The next-biggest name? Perry Johnson, a businessman who attempted to deliver his remarks by phone and, about a week later, would also drop out.
Burgum is an affable midwestern guy with virtually zero national name recognition. He spins his long-shot bid for the Republican nomination as “an entrepreneur’s dream”—huge market potential. Like another one-percenter, Succession’s Connor Roy, Burgum is fighting for his 1 percent in the polls: “Polling trails, you know, people’s impressions.” He’s been running for president for about five months. His campaign profile on X (formerly Twitter) has just over 13,000 followers. He’s not a fixture on Fox News. He hasn’t written a best-selling book, or any book, offering voters a glimpse of his life. As you’re reading this sentence, can you even conjure what his voice sounds like?
This summer, to qualify for the first Republican debate, each candidate had to secure at least 40,000 individual donors. As July 4 approached, Burgum’s campaign had the idea to sell American flags for donations as a way to boost his numbers. But they soon pivoted to a savvier pitch: free money. Burgum’s team would mail anyone who donated $1 a $20 prepaid Visa or Mastercard, dubbed a “Biden inflation relief card,” netting the supporter $19 in profit. Burgum, who made millions in the software business, has described this plan as “a hack.” Though he was criticized for it, he’s executing it again as he hopes to qualify for this month’s debate in Miami. The new thresholds are stricter: at least 70,000 donors and 4 percent of support in two national polls to make the cut. Currently, Burgum has the donors but not the polls. “We are optimistic he will make it,” his spokesperson told me.
“Newt Gingrich said it the other day, twice to two different news outlets: Everybody should drop out because the race is already over. I heard that Newt’s already picked the Super Bowl winner. So we’re gonna cancel the NFL season. No games need to be played,” Burgum told the brewery crowd. Most people in the room laughed. The woman standing next to me, scrolling through her phone, muttered that he had just reminded her to set her fantasy-football lineup.
Former President Donald Trump enjoys a ridiculously large lead in what has come to feel almost like a Potemkin primary. Burgum is among a handful of candidates who seem to earnestly believe that Republicans are still maybe, possibly, you never know, searching for an alternative. But whereas someone like Ron DeSantis has fashioned himself into a wet-blanket version of Trump, Burgum refuses to support book bans or cosplay as MAGA. He does not appear to be courting members of the old guard in the manner of Nikki Haley or Tim Scott. He’s not firing off rhetorical napalm like Vivek Ramaswamy, or casting himself as the anti-Trump, like Chris Christie. What, then, is he doing? I spent a few days following him in New Hampshire, trying to figure that out.
Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, and first lady of North Dakota, Kathryn Burgum, at the New Hampshire state house filing the paperwork to be on the 2024 Presidential ballot in New Hampshire.
B
urgum presents as a down-to-earth, slightly nerdy guy who spent most of his life in business and speaks softly, with a thick Fargo accent. (He’s heard all of your wood-chipper jokes.) He has the requisite ego to run for president but freely admits that pretty much nobody outside North Dakota has any clue who he is. He insists that the modern electoral system is broken, and that, if he is to find any national GOP success, he’ll need to be his honest, authentic, inoffensive self—nothing more. He says he is committed to avoiding the ugly reality-TV tropes of modern electoral politics. It is a noble goal. Is it doomed? Week after week, he presses on, spreading the gospel of Doug Burgum to small groups of people.
I watched Burgum and his entourage roll into Airport Diner, in southern Manchester. (Another long-shot candidate, the Democrat Marianne Williamson, had her campaign bus parked in the adjacent Holiday Inn lot; Burgum was traveling in a black SUV.) He stopped to chat with an elderly couple in matching blue shirts, but the conversation didn’t seem to go anywhere. (“We’re Democrats,” the wife sheepishly told me a few minutes later.) At another table, a 78-year-old woman told me that some man had just come by, but she had no idea who he was. She said that God speaks to her and has told her that Trump is returning to office, but that there won’t even be an election next year—Trump will merely resume his prior presidency. She was reluctant to share her name on the record. “I have lost a lot of friends,” she said. Because of Trump? “Oh, yeah. But, hey, that’s life.”
Out on the trail, Burgum rolls his eyes at The Narrative—capital T, capital N—and scoffs at what he sees as the “nationalization” of the primary system. Cable news, coastal elites, anyone trying to pull a lever inside the Beltway—these are the forces stripping power away from regular people, in Burgum’s view. In almost every speech, he takes umbrage at what he describes as the Republican National Committee’s “clubhouse rules.” Burgum disagrees with, among other things, the RNC’s apparent eagerness to narrow the presidential field. He counters that Americans benefit from a large pool of qualified applicants, and that early-state voters should do the winnowing themselves. He often quotes his favorite president, Theodore Roosevelt: “Let the people rule!”
Like Roosevelt, Burgum projects an Americana-heavy image. He usually steps out in blue jeans and brown cowboy boots. He has praised those who take a shower at the end of the day versus at the beginning. He’s eager to talk about his experience working at his family’s grain elevator and his stint as a chimney sweep. He has a mop of thick hair, a strong jawline, and a hard-to-explain “just happy to be here” vibe. In August, on the eve of the first Republican debate, Burgum blew out his Achilles while playing pickup basketball. (“The skies were clear, but it was raining threes,” he told a reporter.) He’s been using a knee scooter to get around ever since, and told me that when he encounters long ramps, he likes to “let it rip” on his way down. His name is embroidered in big block letters on the blue puffer vest he wears almost every day. He’s rarely in a rush to get out of interactions with strangers, and will be sure to ask, with genuine curiosity, “Where’s home for you?” Burgum himself is from Arthur, North Dakota, population 323. No one from North Dakota has ever won the presidency or, for that matter, been a major party’s nominee.
After finishing at the diner, he traveled north to Hanover, specifically Dartmouth College, where he sat for an interview with a reporter from the school’s conservative newspaper, The Dartmouth Review, and taped an episode of a campus podcast. Later, during a town hall at the college’s public-policy school, he told students that, thanks to AI, they were all “going to live to be a hundred.” This sort of techno-optimism is something that separates Burgum from his competitors. Whereas Trump paints a picture of a failing, dystopian country in need of a supreme leader, Burgum’s focus remains narrow and future-oriented. He waxes long about energy, the economy, and national security. His stump speech isn’t exactly thrilling, yet it can be refreshing—if only because he avoids campaigning on the standard GOP culture-war themes.
Still, as governor, he’s signed several hard-right bills: a near-total abortion ban, a bathroom bill, legislation preventing transgender children from receiving gender-affirming surgery. Additionally, in North Dakota, teachers must now notify parents or guardians if one of their students identifies as trans, and they are permitted to misgender their students. North Dakota is a deep-red state, and many of these bills reached his desk veto-proof. When I asked Burgum to help me understand the motivation behind all of this legislation, he grew defensive, insisting that it’s not about discrimination.
“But like other things,” he said, “what goes on in one state, it’s not going to go in another … As president, I’m focusing on economy, energy, national security, and the limited set of things the federal government is actually supposed to do.”
Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, at Dartmouth College speaking at a town hall with students.
In high school, basketball was Burgum’s passion, and it served as the backdrop of one of the defining moments of his life. He told me about a particularly cold Friday night during his freshman year. He was climbing aboard the team bus to an away game when the school principal pulled him aside. Burgum’s father was in the hospital battling brain cancer; Doug had planned to visit the following day. The principal told him that he had to go to the hospital right away. Burgum was shocked; he’d believed that his dad was on the path to recovery. “No one was being honest with me about the fact that it was imminent,” he said. His father died that night.
As Burgum told me this story, his stoicism slipped. His eyes welled up, and he let out a deep exhale. His family was not wealthy, and his stay-at-home mother immediately started working full-time more than 30 miles away in Fargo, at North Dakota State University. His two elder siblings were now also living in Fargo. His mom wanted to move there, but he says he was stubborn, and refused to leave the basketball team in Arthur. “I didn’t understand the level of economic insecurity,” he said. In practical terms, this meant that his mom would often stay in Fargo overnight instead of commuting back and forth. Burgum told me he spent most of his high-school years alone, fixing things around the house in his father’s absence.
“My mom was good at all these things, but she didn’t know how to grieve. Her solution to grieving was to go back to work and just kind of bury it,” he said, later adding, “So I developed this incredible work ethic that kind of mirrored my mother, which was: Just work your way through.”
After finishing his undergraduate degree at North Dakota State, Burgum went on to Stanford for business school, spent two years in Chicago working for McKinsey, then returned home. He likes to say he “literally” bet the farm when he mortgaged his family farmland in order to get a computer-accounting business, Great Plains Software, off the ground. “There is a bit of, I think, geographic bigotry that actually exists in our country, where people that haven’t been to places, they assume that we’re still, you know, plowing fields with horses or something.”
His wife, Kathryn, is the sister of one of Burgum’s fraternity brothers from North Dakota State. Burgum almost always uses the first-person plural pronoun we when discussing his political career. On the campaign trail, he praises his wife’s courage.
She later told me some of her story. When the couple first started dating, about two decades ago, Kathryn was newly in recovery. She had begun drinking during high school, using alcohol to self-medicate. “I had anxiety and depression and didn’t really have anybody to talk to about it,” she said. She then spent 20 years trying, and failing, to stop. She was constantly blacking out. She told me she didn’t know people who could have only a single glass of wine, or who could choose not to drink, because they were driving home. “I didn’t have deep relationships even with my family, because addiction gets in the way of all that,” she said. During her darkest days with booze, she became suicidal.
For years, Kathryn worked to keep her recovery a secret from most everyone in her life, and she credits Burgum with being supportive throughout her sobriety. In 2016, when he told her about his plan to run for governor, she had a flash of panic: How am I going to handle all these people all the time? All of these events have alcohol. The couple reached an agreement: She could leave, or simply skip, any event she wanted to. When Burgum won the election, Kathryn decided to finally talk publicly about her addiction.
At a USA Today–network town hall in Exeter, Burgum described his wife’s journey as she looked on from the front row. He also made a plea for more compassion toward people with drug addiction who have committed crimes. He decried the obstacles that nonviolent offenders face after they leave prison, including trouble finding housing and employment: “We have legalized discrimination against people who had a disease—a brain disease that led them into that spot.” His stance is forward-thinking. It’s also out of step with much of the GOP. Were he to move up in the polls, he’d almost certainly be attacked by his peers as soft on crime.
Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, at Dartmouth College speaking at a town hall with students.
While Trump continues to float miles above his Republican competitors, the rest of them dutifully show up to various “cattle calls” in the early states. One such event, the New Hampshire GOP’s First in the Nation Leadership Summit, took over a Sheraton the weekend I was following Burgum. Reporters and camerapeople and the cast of Showtime’s The Circus stalked the grounds looking for something—anything—resembling a story. As Burgum and Mike Pence momentarily exchanged pleasantries in the lobby, journalists materialized en masse, then vanished; no meat to be had. (Pence would drop out just over two weeks later.)
Burgum navigated the crowded hallways on his scooter. He recorded a podcast next to an area where Kevin Sorbo, the Hercules actor turned right-wing culture warrior, sold copies of his books. He also sat on a national-security panel with Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa. (At one point, Burgum fired off a seemingly improvised joke about how Iowa is “Canada’s Florida.”) During the Q&A, an audience member asked what could prevent someone like Bill Gates from buying up all of America’s farmland. Burgum gently pointed out that agriculture is far less concentrated than people believe. Gates, he said, is already among America’s largest private owners of farmland, but that means he has a fraction of a percent of what’s out there. It was a surprising statistic—though perhaps not as surprising as watching Burgum instinctively defend one of the GOP’s biggest bogeymen.
In 2001, Burgum and his associates sold Great Plains to Microsoft for $1.1 billion. That deal has led many people to infer that Burgum himself is a billionaire. During our interview, after he continually sought to portray himself as an underdog, outsider candidate, I asked him if the phrase billionaire underdog might be considered an oxymoron. He strongly denied that he’s worth $1 billion. Even after much prodding, though, he refused to share his exact net worth. (It’s reportedly in the hundreds of millions of dollars.) So far this year, he’s lent his campaign more than $12 million of his own fortune. His super PAC, Best of America, has raised about that same amount, notably with the help of his cousin Frederick Burgum, who donated $2 million. But I was most interested in his relationship with Gates, the single biggest donor to Burgum’s 2016 gubernatorial bid.
I asked Burgum what Gates is like as a person.
“It’d be a good question for him, I suppose.”
“Well, I mean, aren’t you friends?”
He said that he has observed an “evolution” in Gates over the four decades they’ve known each other, then remarked, “He’s the most, you know, one of the most misunderstood people that we have in America right now.”
Burgum said that Gates and his ex-wife, Melinda, have saved more lives than anyone “probably in the history of the planet.” I asked Burgum how he plans to reckon with the portion of the GOP electorate—those who adhere to conspiracies such as QAnon and Pizzagate—who believe that Gates drinks the blood of children.
Burgum said that he knows how to talk to voters “of all stripes and beliefs,” and that, if you’re going to lead people, you have to meet them where they are. Still, he said, “there are some people that believe things, and they believe ’em like it’s religion. And you’re sort of asking me, What would I say to them? Well, you can’t tell them to stop believing [their] religion if they believe it. In politics, you have to say, then, that that voter may or may not be available.”
I found his willingness to draw lines admirable, but it didn’t extend to Donald Trump. He likes to say that, as governor of North Dakota, nukes are in his backyard. (“I have friends who, literally, they farm here and the nuclear silo is right there,” he told me.) I asked him if voters can trust Trump with the nuclear codes. He paused. “Voters will have to decide that,” he said. I asked him if he, Doug Burgum, trusts Trump with the nuclear codes. He dodged: “Nuclear weapons exist for one reason.” I asked him for a yes-or-no answer. He responded, “So when you say ‘trust him,’ what does that mean?” I noted that people in the Department of Defense—including former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley—have specifically said that Trump can’t be trusted with the nuclear codes, and that although many questions understandably have gray answers, this one seemed black-and-white. He paused again, then eventually offered another trained-politician answer.
“I think it’s a question of, do we think that nuclear weapons act as a deterrent for our country? And if you think we have a president that will never use them, then they don’t work. If you have a president that will use them, they do work. And it’s partly not what we think. It’s partly what the enemy thinks. And if the enemy thinks that we have a president that will actually launch a nuclear weapon, then the deterrents work. And so, I think we have to look at who they’re pointed at, not just who’s pulling the trigger.”
Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, and his wife, Kathryn, at Stark Brewing Company in Manchester, NH for a GOP 170th birthday event.
The next morning, Burgum and his team wandered among rows of tailgaters outside a University of New Hampshire football game. A Fox News reporter filmed a quick-hit interview with the governor while students played touch football in the background. (One wide receiver dramatically spiked the ball after completing a slant route that took him right past Burgum and toward a Dumpster.) Tailgaters looked on quizzically, or not at all, as Burgum and his entourage sauntered by.
“Oh, it’s Doug!” someone in dark sunglasses called out. The man, 28, told me that he’s from Boston and has the type of job where he can’t share his political views with his name attached. He said he voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but lost respect for him after he appeared to go back on his implicit promise to serve only one term. He added that he appreciates how Burgum seems like “a genuinely good person” and isn’t a career politician, though he’d like to see him move up in the polls.
A middle-aged woman offered Burgum a homemade cheesesteak. He accepted, and held the greasy bread in his bare hand for minutes before another tailgater offered him a napkin. He took a bite, but not before wisely asking the Fox News person not to film him eating.
Kickoff was soon approaching. The tailgaters showed no signs of packing it in. Grills sizzled; beers were pounded; beanbags thunked against cornhole sets. Burgum waved and smiled.
Three girls were standing at a distance, alternately watching him with the cheesesteak and fiddling with their phones.
I asked one of them if she knew anything about Doug Burgum.
“What’s he running for?” she asked.
“President.”
“Good for him,” she said.
Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, at Stark Brewing Company in Manchester, NH for a GOP 170th birthday event.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — As the first step in a new partnership focused on equity in math education, Casio and Open Up Resources (OUR) have joined forces to integrate Casio’s ClassPad.net technology into the Algebra 1 Program of Open Up High School Mathematics, the organizations announced today at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics conference. This collaboration addresses challenges stemming from limited access to technology resources, aiming to create a more inclusive and enriching learning environment.
Open Up High School Mathematics students and educators now have access to ClassPad.net, an intuitive online tool seamlessly incorporated into OUR’s openly accessible curriculum. This platform empowers teachers and students to delve further into the presented mathematical concepts.
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A new survey of K-8 teachers and students from LEGO Education found that nearly all (98 percent) of students say purposeful play helps them learn and the majority (96 percent) of teachers believe it’s more effective than traditional methods
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I believe that the low supply of STEM professionals can be attributed to significant barriers to entry originating in educational settings–this is to no fault of teachers and administrators, but how the educational system is structured.
The benefits of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education are numerous, and one would be hard-pressed to find a school district that doesn’t have a project, initiative, class, or lesson with the acronym in its title.
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — October historically has been a month of notable volatility in the stock market, with historic crashes like the 1929 Great Depression and Black Monday in 1987. These events have given rise to a sense of “Octoberphobia” among some investors. Lessons on these events and others are included in Common Sense Economics from Poptential™, a comprehensive and free high school digital curriculum. Click to tweet.
“It’s never too early for teachers to engage students in discussions about the history of the stock market, its impact on economic growth or decline, and how it can potentially empower students to invest in their own futures,” said Julie Smitherman, a former social studies teacher and director of content at Certell, Inc., the nonprofit behind Poptential.
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Indiana is in the midst of an enormous undertaking to improve literacy rates. The approach: Align state standards, curriculum, and teacher training programs with practices rooted in the science of reading.
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Two adults were killed and several teenagers were injured after their bus overturned on its way to band camp Thursday afternoon. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said the charter bus rolled into a ravine about 70 miles northwest of New York City. Doug Williams from CBS News New York has the latest.
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Introducing Learn Stage 3.0: A Revolutionary Update to Excel High School SIS/LMS Designed to Enhance Real-Time Course Progress Tracking, Billing Management, and Overall Improvement on User Experience.
MINNETONKA, Minn., September 11, 2023 (Newswire.com)
– Excel High School is thrilled to announce the launch of its updated Student Information System (SIS), Learn Stage 3.0. The new developments mark a significant stride forward in educational technology for the institution and its students. As a leader in online education, Excel offers a personalized and comprehensive approach to online learning. Known for its commitment to academic excellence and technological innovation, the school continuously seeks ways to enrich the learning experience and better serve its diverse student body.
Why The Upgrade? Aiming For Excellence
With an unyielding commitment to innovation and student success, Excel High School is setting the benchmark for what an online educational platform should be. The enhanced Learn Stage 3.0 system is a culmination of thoughtful design, resource investment, and dedication to ensuring a top-notch user experience for both students, parents, and stakeholders.
“We are committed to offering our students an enhanced, intuitive, and seamless learning experience. With Learn Stage 3.0, we’ve reimagined how students and parents interact with our learning platforms. Users can get real-time updates on course selection, progress, tuition, reporting, records, schedules, graduation planning, and more,” said Rod Clarkson, CEO of Excel High School. “Learn Stage 3.0 isn’t just an update; it’s a revolution in how we approach online learning.”
Future-Ready Education for All
The revamped Learn Stage 3.0 offers students and parents real-time information about course progress, and billing, and presents a fresh, easy-to-navigate user interface. The platform has been developed to meet the diverse needs of Excel’s student body and aims to be intuitive while offering a broad range of functionality.
Learn Stage 3.0 aligns perfectly with Excel High School’s ongoing passion to offer every student a future-ready, personalized learning experience. By continually updating and refining our learning platforms, Excel ensures users have access to the very best digital tools to facilitate learning. As the academic landscape shifts towards digital engagement, Excel High School remains at the forefront, ready to adapt and innovate. Excel has made a video demonstration available that provides students with an in-depth look at this enhanced system.
About Excel High School
Since 2005, Excel High School has delivered high-quality, accredited, online K-12 and adult high school programs. The cornerstone of the Excel program combines personalized learning pathways with a flexible schedule, guided by highly qualified instructors and supported by an award-winning curriculum. This comprehensive approach is enhanced by user-friendly technology and enriched by a diverse online learning community. For more information, call 800-620-3844 or visit https://www.excelhighschool.com. Excel High School is a division of Excel Education Systems, Inc., a global leader in online education.
After decades of declining enrollment in vocational arts programs, a skilled labor shortage is prompting some high schools to place a renewed emphasis on career education. “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil has the story.
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LAGUNA BEACH, Calif., July 1, 2023 (Newswire.com)
– ASSE International Student Exchange Programs (ASSE) is looking for local families to host boys and girls ages 15-18 arriving in the fall to attend community high schools, as participants in U.S. Department of State cultural exchange programs.
Americans are among the most generous people in the world, and a popular way of making positive impacts is to host a foreign high school exchange student. We invite your family to be a part of history by helping to shape the future leaders of countries such as Germany, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Morocco, and many more.
All Scholarship students have a proven drive to succeed as they participate in rigorous rounds of competition to be selected for the programs and are carefully chosen by trained evaluators based on their ability to adapt and thrive away from home in a new culture for a year. Each year, tens of thousands of top students compete for one of approximately 2,000 spots in the CBYX, FLEX, and YES programs.
Whether you are a young family, retired, a single parent, or empty-nesters, and interested in bringing a part of the world into your home, hosting one of these youngsters is an extraordinary opportunity to learn firsthand about their countries and, at the same time, you have the chance to teach them about the United States and the culture and values of your community.
Department of State Scholarship Students have pocket money from personal or scholarship funds, and they are covered by accident and illness insurance. They also give back to their American communities through volunteering and community service.
The students are grateful to you and the USA for giving them the opportunity to live with your family and in your community for a school year. It’s an honor for ASSE to have been awarded these prestigious grants since its inception, and our goal is to make each and every one of the student’s dreams come true.
By generously opening your home to a young person from overseas, you can help us continue our global commitment to spreading the ideals of peace, love, and understanding.
To become a host family for one of these extraordinary young scholarship recipients, please call Amy at (800) 736-1760, email host@asse.com / eca-press@stage.org or go to www.host.asse.comto beginthe process of welcoming your new son or daughter into your family today.
ASSE International is a non-profit, tax-exempt, public benefit organization, ID # 95-3034133. ASSE is officially designated as an exchange visitor program by the United States Department of State, was founded by the Swedish National Department of Education, and our programs are conducted in accordance with the high standards established by the U.S. Council on Standards for International Educational Travel (CSIET).
Source: ASSE International Student Exchange Programs
In 2016, I gave up Diet Coke. This was no small adjustment. I was born and raised in suburban Atlanta, home to the Coca-Cola Company’s global headquarters, and I had never lived in a home without Diet Coke stocked in the refrigerator at all times. Every morning in high school, I’d slam one with breakfast, and then I’d make sure to shove some quarters (a simpler time) in my back pocket to use in the school’s vending machines. When I moved into my freshman college dorm, the first thing I did was stock my mini fridge with cans. A few years later, my then-boyfriend swathed two 12-packs in wrapping paper and put them under his Christmas tree. It was a joke, but it wasn’t.
You’d think quitting would have been agonizing. To my surprise, it was easy. For years, I’d heard anecdotes about people who forsook diet drinks and felt their health improve seemingly overnight—better sleep, better skin, better energy. I’d also heard whispers about the larger suspected dangers of fake sweeteners. Yet I’d loved my DCs too much to be swayed. Then I tried my first can of unsweetened seltzer at a friend’s apartment. After years of turning my nose up at the thought of LaCroix, I realized that much of what I enjoyed about Diet Coke was its frigidity and fizz. That was enough. I switched to seltzer on the spot, prepared to join the smug converted and receive whatever health benefits were sure to accrue to me for my good behavior.
Except they never came. Seven years later, I feel no better than I ever did drinking four or five cans of the stuff a day. I still stick to seltzer anyway—because, you know, who knows?—and I’ve mostly forgotten that Diet Coke exists. But the diet sodas had not, as it turns out, been preventing me from getting great sleep or calming my rosacea or feeling, I don’t know, zesty. Besides the caffeine, they appeared to make no difference in how good or bad I felt at all.
Yesterday, Reuters reported that the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer will soon declare aspartame, the sweetener used in Diet Coke and many other no-calorie sodas, as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” I probably should have felt vindicated. I may not feel better now, but many years down the road (knock on wood), I’ll be better off. I’d bet on the right horse! Instead, I felt nothing so much as irritation. Over the past few decades, a growing number of foods and behaviors have become the regular subject of vague, ever-changing health warnings—fake sweeteners, real sugar, wine, butter, milk (dairy and non), carbohydrates, coffee, fat, chocolate, eggs, meat, veganism, vegetarianism, weightlifting, drinking a lot of water, and scores of others. The more warnings there are, the less actionable any particular one of them feels. What, exactly, is anyone supposed to do with any of this information, except feel bad about the things they enjoy?
It’s worth reviewing what is actually known or suspected about diet sodas and health. The lion’s share of research on this topic happens in what are known as observational studies—scientists track consumption and record health outcomes, looking for commonalities and trends linking behavior and effects. These studies can’t tell you if the behavior caused the outcome, but they can establish an association that’s worth investigating further. Regular, sustained diet-soda consumption has been linked to weight gain, Type 2 diabetes, and increased risk of stroke, among other things—understandably troublesome correlations for people worried about their health. But there’s a huge complicating factor in understanding what that means: For decades, advertisements recommended that people who were already worried about—or already had—some of those same health concerns substitute diet drinks for those with real sugar, and many such people still make those substitutions in order to adhere to low-carb diets or even out their blood sugar. As a result, little evidence suggests that diet soda is solely responsible for any of those issues—health is a highly complicated, multifactorial phenomenon in almost every aspect—but many experts still recommend limiting your consumption of diet soda as a reasonable precaution.
A representative for the IARC would neither confirm nor deny the nature of the WHO’s pending announcement on aspartame, which will be released on July 14. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Reuters’s reporting is correct: In two weeks, the organization will update the sweetener’s designation to indicate that it’s “possibly carcinogenic.” To regular people, those words—especially in the context of a health organization’s public bulletins—would seem to imply significant suspicion of real danger. The evidence may not yet all be in place, but surely there’s enough reason to believe that the threat is real, that there’s cause to spook the general public.
Except, as my colleague Ed Yong wrote in 2015, when the IARC made a similar announcement about the carcinogenic potential of meat, that’s not what the classification means at all. The IARC chops risk up into four categories: carcinogenic (Group 1), probably carcinogenic (Group 2A), possibly carcinogenic (Group 2B), and unclassified (Group 3). Those categories do one very specific thing: They describe how definitive the agency believes the evidence is for any level of increased risk, even a very tiny one. The category in which aspartame may soon find itself, 2B, makes no grand claims about carcinogenicity. “In practice, 2B becomes a giant dumping ground for all the risk factors that IARC has considered, and could neither confirm nor fully discount as carcinogens. Which is to say: most things,” Yong wrote. “It’s a bloated category, essentially one big epidemiological shruggie.”
The categories are not at all intended to communicate the degree of the risk involved—just how sure or unsure the organization is that there’s a risk associated with a thing or substance at all. And association can mean a lot of things. Hypothetically, regular consumption of food that may quadruple your risk of a highly deadly cancer would fall in the same category as something that may increase your risk of a cancer with a 95 percent survival rate by just a few percentage points, as long as the IARC felt similarly confident in the evidence for both of those effects.
These designations about carcinogenicity are just one example of how health information can arrive to the general public in ways that are functionally useless, even if well intentioned. Earlier this year, the WHO advised against all use of artificial sweeteners. At first, that might sound dire. But the actual substance of the warning was about the limited evidence that those sweeteners aid in weight loss, not any new evidence about their unique ability to harm your health in some way. (The warning did nod to the links between long-term use of artificial sweeteners and increased risks of cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and premature death, but as the WHO noted at the time, these are understood as murky correlations, not part of an alarming breakthrough discovery.)
The same release quotes the WHO’s director for nutrition and food safety advising that, for long-term weight control, people need to find ways beyond artificial sweeteners to reduce their consumption of real sugar—in essence, it’s not a health alert about any particular chemical, but about dessert as a concept. How much of any sweetener would you need to cut out of your diet in order to limit any risks it may pose? The release, on its own, doesn’t specify. Consider a birthday crudités platter instead of a cake, just to be sure. (Is that celery non-GMO? Organic? Just checking.)
The media, surely, deserve our fair share of blame for how quickly and how far these oversimplified ideas spread. Many people are very worried about the food they eat—perhaps because they have received so many conflicting indicators over the years about how that food affects their bodies—and flock to news that something has been deemed beneficial or dangerous. At best, the research that many such stories cite is rarely definitive, and at worst, it’s so poorly designed or otherwise flawed that it’s flatly incapable of producing useful information.
Taken in aggregate, this morass of poor communication and confusing information has the very real potential to exhaust people’s ability to identify and respond to actual risk, or to confuse them into nihilism. The solution-free finger-wagging, so often about the exact things that many people experience as the little joys in everyday life, doesn’t help. When everything is an ambiguously urgent health risk, it very quickly begins to feel like nothing is. I still drink a few Diet Cokes a year, and I maintain that there’s no better beverage to pair with pizza. We’re all going to die someday.
Though the percentage of Latino students is on the rise in the U.S., high school textbooks used across the country largely ignore Latino history, a new study has found.
Researchers with Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and UnidosUS, a national Latino advocacy and research organization, developed a list of 222 important Latino history topics, but found only 12% of those were covered well.
The study, released Tuesday, comes amid a rise in the number of Hispanic students in U.S. public schools. Between the fall of 2009 and fall of 2020, the percentage of Hispanic public school students increased from 22% to 28%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Recent growth in the U.S. Hispanic population has been largely driven by births rather than by immigration, the Pew Research Center said in 2022.
Hispanic students are currently projected to become 30% of the U.S. student population by 2030, according to federal education data.
More inclusion in textbooks won’t benefit just Latino students, argues Viviana López Green, senior director of the Racial Equity Initiative at UnidosUS.
“As the country grows more diverse, it’s essential for our future workers, businesspeople, community leaders, and public officials to learn about the contributions and experiences of all Americans, including Latinos, the country’s largest racial/ethnic minority,” Green said in a press release about the study.
According to the researchers, that includes learning more about the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the U.S. acquisition of Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal, the modern civil rights movement, Cold War politics and legal developments shaping the Latino experience, such as the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and racial segregation.
“The American Latino experience must be accurately depicted to our young people in the classroom if we want them to grow up in a society that recognizes and values the contributions made by people of color,” José Gregory, a U.S. history teacher at Marist School in Atlanta and a consultant on the project, said in a statement.
The researchers made their determination after analyzing five high school U.S. history textbooks and one AP U.S. history book. The study did not include the names of the textbooks.
“This project aims to quantify imbalances that pertain to the entire field, rather than to cast praise or aspersions on any individual publisher,” the news release read. “Our hope is that the findings herein will inspire all curriculum designers, whether publishers or school system leads, to include the longstanding presence, challenges, and contributions of the Latino community in the telling of United States history.”
To pick the textbooks, the research team looked at textbooks used in five states with the largest Latino student populations, along with two states with small Latino populations. Researchers contacted publishers about sales in each state, but they did not hear back, so they contacted the relevant state education agencies instead to pick which textbooks they’d study.
The study authors noted that their results have been unveiled at a fraught time in the U.S. political sphere, and immigration remains an ongoing and contentious issue. The researchers said the situation makes asking questions about the education system even more important.
“Namely, how can we introduce the next generation to the story of the United States in a truthful and empowering way,” the study authors asked. “To what extent must we lament and also honor the past? How do we ensure that U.S. History reflects the complex interaction of diverse peoples whose contributions shape the democracy in which we live today? There are no perfect answers, but the pursuit is worth undertaking together.”
Police are investigating after two teenage girls were found dead at a high school in Fayette County, Tennessee yesterday.
A third teenager was transported to a hospital in “critical condition,” the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office said on Facebook. She is now in stable condition, according to CBS News affiliate WREG Memphis.
It’s not clear what caused the deaths, but police said they are being investigated as possible drug overdoses.
Police told WREG Memphis that the incident occurred at Fayette-Ware High School around 4:40 p.m., just hours before the school’s graduation ceremony. Chief Deputy Ray Garcia told WREG Memphis that the office was notified that there were “two individuals that were found that appeared not to be breathing.”
Kyrsten Sinema knows what everybody says about her. She pretends not to read the press coverage—“I don’t really care”—but she knows. She knows what her colleagues call her behind her back (“egomaniac,” “traitor”). She knows how many articles The New York Times has published about her wardrobe (five). She feels misunderstood, and she would like to explain herself.
We’re sitting across from each other in her “hideaway,” a small, windowless room in the basement of the U.S. Capitol Building. Every senator gets one of these subterranean, chamber-adjacent bunkers, and most are outfitted with dark, utilitarian furniture. But Sinema’s walls are pale pink, the couches burnt orange, and desert-themed tchotchkes evoking her native Arizona are interspersed among bottles of wine and liquor.
Sinema tells me that there are several popular narratives about her in the media, all of them “inaccurate.” One is that she’s “mysterious,” “mercurial,” “an enigma”—that she makes her decisions on unknowable whims. She regards this portrayal as “fairly absurd”: “I think I’m a highly predictable person.”
“Then,” she goes on, “there’s the She’s just doing what’s best for her and not for her state or for her country” narrative. “And I think that’s a strange narrative, particularly when you contrast it with”—here she pauses, and then smirks—“ya know, the facts.”
You can see, in moments like these, why she bothers people. She speaks in a matter-of-fact staccato, her tone set frequently to smug. She says things like “I am a long-term thinker in a short-term town” and “I prefer to be successful.” The overall effect, if you’re not charmed by it (and a lot of her Republican colleagues are), is condescension bordering on arrogance. Sinema, who graduated from high school at 16 and college at 18, carries herself like she is unquestionably the smartest person in the room.
No one would mistake her for being dumb, though. In the past two years, Sinema has been at the center of virtually every major piece of bipartisan legislation passed by the Senate, negotiating deals on infrastructure, guns, and a bill that codifies the right to same-sex marriage. She has also become a villain to the left, proudly standing in the way of Democrats’ more ambitious agenda by refusing to eliminate the filibuster. The tension culminated with her announcement in December that she was leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an independent.
Sinema hasn’t given many in-depth interviews since then, but she says she agreed to meet with me because she wants to show that what she’s doing “works.” She thinks that, unfashionable though it may be, her approach to legislating—compromise, centrism, bipartisan consensus-building—is the only way to get anything done in Washington. I was interested in a separate, but related, question: What exactly is she trying to get done? Much of the discussion around Sinema has focused on the puzzle of what she really believes. What does Kyrsten Sinema want?What Does Kyrsten Sinema stand for? The subtext in these headlines is that if you dig deep enough, a secret belief system will be revealed. Is she a progressive opportunistically cosplaying as a centrist? A conservative finally showing her true colors? The truth, according to Sinema herself, is that there is no ideological core to discover.
I learn this when I describe for Sinema the story I hear most often about her: that she started out as an idealistic progressive activist—organizing protests against the Iraq War, marching for undocumented immigrants in 100-degree heat, leading the effort to defeat a gay-marriage ban in Arizona—but that gradually she sold out her youthful idealism and morphed into a Washington moderate who pals around with Republicans and protects tax breaks for hedge-fund managers.
To my surprise, Sinema doesn’t really push back on this one. For one thing, she tells me, she’s proud that she outgrew the activism of her youth. It was, in her own assessment, “a spectacular failure.”
I ask her to elaborate.
“Well,” she says, with a derisive shrug. “You can make a poster and stand out on the street, but at the end of the day, all you have is a sunburn. You didn’t move the needle. You didn’t make a difference … I set about real quick saying, ‘This doesn’t work.’”
Listening to her talk this way about activism, it’s hard not to think about the protesters who have hounded her in recent years. They chase her through airports, yell at her at weddings. In one controversial episode, a group of student protesters at Arizona State University followed her into the bathroom, continuing to film as they hectored her. (The ASU police recommended misdemeanor charges against four students involved.)
I ask Sinema if, as a former activist herself, she could understand where those students were coming from. Would she have done the same thing when she was young?
“Break the law?” she scoffs. “No.”
She doesn’t like civil disobedience, thinks it drives more people away than it attracts. More to the point, Sinema contends, the activists who spend their time noisily berating her in person and online aren’t doing much for the causes they purport to care about. “I am much happier showing a two-year record of incredible achievements that are literally making a difference in people’s lives than sharing my thoughts on Twitter.” She punctuates these last words with the sort of contempt that only someone who’s tweeted more than 17,000 times can feel.
It’s not just the activism she’s discarded; it’s also the left-wing politics. Sinema, who described herself in 2006 as “the most liberal legislator in the state of Arizona,” freely admits that she’s much less progressive than she used to be. While her critics contend that she adjusted her politics to win statewide office in Arizona, she chalks up the evolution to “age and maturity.” She bristles at the idea that politicians shouldn’t be allowed to change their mind. “Imagine a world in which everybody who represented you refused to grow or change or learn if presented with new information,” she tells me. “That’s very dangerous for our democracy. So perhaps what I’m most proud of is that I’m a lifelong learner.”
Still, Sinema insists that people overstate how much she’s changed. Leaving the Democratic Party was, in her telling, a kind of homecoming. “I’m not a joiner,” she says. “It’s not my thing.” She points out that she wasn’t a Democrat when she started in politics. I point out that at the time she was aligned with the Green Party. She demurs.
Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona attended hearings on Capitol Hill on Wednesday afternoon. (Photograph by Natalie Keyssar for The Atlantic)
“I never think about where [my position] is on the political spectrum, because I don’t care,” she tells me. “People will say, ‘Oh, we don’t know what her position is.’ Well, I may not have one yet. And I know that’s weird in this town, but I actually want to do all of the research, get as much knowledge as possible, spend all of the time doing the work, before I make a decision.”
I ask her if there’s any ideological through line at all that explains the various votes she’s taken in the Senate. She thinks about it before answering, “No.”
She says she’s guided by an unchanging set of “values”—she mentions freedom, opportunity, and security—that virtually all Americans share. When it comes to legislating, Sinema sees herself as “practical”—a dealmaker, a problem solver. And if taking every policy question on a case-by-case basis bewilders some in Washington, Sinema says it’s just her nature. Even in her private life, she tells me, she’s prone to slow, painstaking deliberation. I ask for an example.
“It took me eight years to decide what to get for my first tattoo,” she offers.
So what did you decide on? I ask.
“I don’t actually want to share that.”
To illustrate the effectiveness of her legislative approach, she likes to point to the gun-control bill she helped pass last year. It began the day after a man opened fire at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 kids. Sinema made a rare comment to the press, telling reporters that she was going to approach her colleagues about potential legislative solutions. From there, she recalls, she went straight to the Senate floor and asked Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, “Who should I work with?” He pointed her to Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, both of whom she immediately texted. A few minutes after that, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, texted her asking if she meant what she’d said to the press. “I was like, ‘I’m Kyrsten. I always mean what I say.’”
“The next morning, four of us senators sat right here and had our first meeting,” she tells me. “Twenty-eight days later, we had a bill.”
It was the first gun-control bill to pass Congress in nearly 30 years, and getting the deal done wasn’t easy. But Sinema says she followed a few lessons she’d learned from past negotiations. The first was to ignore the reporters who were camped out in the hallways. “We would come out of the meeting, and they would be like little vultures outside the door asking what just happened,” she recalls. “Why on earth would I tell anyone what just happened in the meeting when I’m trying to nail down some of the most difficult elements of an agreement?”
Her allergy to the Capitol Hill press corps—which she tells me is generally obsessed with covering “the petty and the hysterical”—was not shared by all of her colleagues. “There are some folks who really enjoy talking to the press so they can tell them what they think or whatever. I’m not that interested in telling people what I think.”
Another principle she followed was to prioritize dealing directly with her colleagues in person. She’d found that many bipartisan negotiations get bogged down early on with a process termed “trading paper,” wherein senators’ staffs exchange proposals and counterproposals until they agree on legislative language—or, more often, reach an impasse. “When I first got here, I was like, What are you doing?” She says disagreements can be resolved much more quickly by getting her colleagues in a room and refusing to leave until they’ve figured it out.
This is why when progressives criticize her as flaky, dilettantish, or out of her depth, it strikes her as fundamentally gendered. More than any other line of attack, this seems to really bother her. She points to Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, who said in 2021 that Sinema lacked “the basic competence” to be in Congress.
“I mean, when there are … elected officials who say ‘She’s in over her head,’ or ‘She’s not substantive,’ or ‘She doesn’t know what she’s talking about’—that is, um, absurd,” she tells me, her tone sharpening. “Because I know every detail of every piece of legislation. And it’s okay if others don’t. They weren’t in the room when we were writing it.” She added that Khanna “doesn’t know me, and I don’t know him. The term colleague is to be loosely applied there.” (Asked for comment, Khanna told me that he’d criticized Sinema during the debate over the Build Back Better bill “because she was unwilling to explain her position and engage with the press, her colleagues, and the public.”)
The result of all the laborious gun-control negotiations was the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which was signed into law last June. The law expanded background checks for gun buyers under 21, enhanced mental-health services in schools, and provided funding for states to implement “red-flag laws,” which allow authorities to temporarily confiscate guns from individuals deemed dangerous. Critics on the left dismissed the law as a half measure. But to Sinema, the fact that she and her colleagues made any progress on such an intractable issue was validation for her method of operating.
Patient, painful bipartisan dealmaking, she tells me, is “the only approach that works. Because the other approaches make a lot of noise but don’t get anything done.”
I ask her what other approaches she’s thinking of.
“I don’t know,” Sinema says with a shrug. “Yelling?”
Members of her former party would argue that there was another option for enacting their policy vision—eliminating the filibuster, which requires 60 votes for most legislation in the Senate, to start passing bills with simple majorities—but Sinema ensured that was impossible. She makes no apologies for voting to preserve the filibuster last year. In fact, she tells me, she would reinstate it for judicial nominees. She believes that the Democrats who want to be able to pass sweeping legislation with narrow majorities have forgotten that one day Republicans will be in control again. “When people are in power, they think they’ll never lose power.”
Before departing her hideaway, I return to Sinema’s central argument—that her approach “works.” It’s hard to evaluate objectively. What to make of a senator who leaves her party, professes to have no ideological agenda, and yet manages to wield outsize influence in writing the laws of the nation? Some might look at her record and see a hollow careerism that prizes bipartisanship for its own sake. Others might argue that in highly polarized times, politicians like her are necessary to grease the gears of a dysfunctional government.
One thing is clear, though: If Sinema wants to persuade other political leaders to take the same path she has taken, she’ll need to demonstrate that it’s electorally viable. So far, the polls in Arizona suggest she would struggle to get reelected as an independent in 2024; she already has challengers on the right and the left. A survey earlier this year found that she was among the most unpopular senators in the country.
Sinema tells me she hasn’t decided yet whether she’ll seek reelection, but she talks like someone who’s not planning on it. She’s only 46 years old; she has other interests. “I’m not only a senator,” she tells me. “I’m also lots of other things.” I ask if she worries about what lessons will be drawn in Washington if her independent turn leads to the end of her political career.
She pauses and answers with a smirk: “I don’t worry about hypotheticals.”
Actor and activist Gabrielle Union stars with Oscar winner Octavia Spencer in the third season of “Truth Be Told.” The show is about a true crime podcaster who teams up with a high school principal to bring awareness to the missing Black girls in the community. Gabrielle Union, a sexual assault survivor, joins “CBS Mornings” to talk about how her experience helped her approach this story, and the support she received from her family and friends.
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Civil rights attorney Ben Crump is suing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over his decision to reject an Advanced Placement African American studies pilot program in the state’s high schools. Timothy Welbeck, an assistant professor of instruction in the Department of Africology and African American Studies at Temple University and the director of the Center for Anti-Racism, joins CBS News to discuss the controversy.
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Annual program provides funding and innovative leadership development opportunities for young people to tackle some of society’s most pressing problems.
Press Release –
Jan 18, 2023
NEW YORK, January 18, 2023 (Newswire.com)
– Riley’s Way Foundation opened theirCall For Kindness program today, calling on young changemakers (13-22 years old) from across the country to submit their ideas for projects rooted in kindness, empathy, and inclusivity. The Call For Kindness, now in its fifth year, offers youth the chance to participate in a dynamic Leadership Development Fellowship and win up to $3,000 to fund a project that strengthens their local, national, or global communities.
“It’s been incredibly inspiring to see the range of projects young people are leading in their schools and communities,” remarked Dr. Christine O’Connell, Executive Director of Riley’s Way Foundation. “Their passion, resolve, and leadership remind us that the hope for the future lies in great part with the ideas and actions of today’s youth.”
Young people (13-22) are invited to submit a new or existing idea, managing everything from prevailing social justice issues to pressing community-based needs. As many as 36 youth-led projects will receive awards. This year, a separate category will consider 10 projects focused on environmental justice, as the climate crisis and other environmental problems require critical attention.
Additionally, Riley’s Way will continue to support a dance and arts category, the Yuriko Kikuchi Arigato Award, in honor of Yuriko, the pioneering dancer, and choreographer.
“Becoming a Riley’s Way Call For Kindness Fellow has meant that even if things get hard, I’m not alone, and have all these resources if I need anything,” shared 2022 Call For Kindness Fellow Ryan Syed, founder of SAYA’s Project Loving Me.
Past projects have addressed the mental health and well-being of vulnerable communities, promoted education equity, bridged the tech industry’s demographic gap, supported those experiencing homelessness, combatted food insecurity, and much more. The complete list of Call For Kindness projects can be found here.
“The future belongs to a new generation of leaders, who with unshakable determination and a clear sense of purpose, will blaze a trail of innovation and progress to tackle society’s toughest challenges,” shared Ian Sandler, Co-Founder, Board Chair of Riley’s Way. “I am honored to be a part of their journey and will tirelessly work to empower them with the tools and resources they need to make their boldest visions a reality.”
Riley’s Way Foundation is a national nonprofit organization that empowers a youth-led kindness movement, providing young people with the programs, support, and inclusive community they need to thrive as changemakers. Their programs provide young leaders with the tools and resources to envision and achieve change. Riley’s Way is committed to supporting these young leaders to build a better world that values kindness, empathy, connection, and the voices of all youth. Mackenzie and Ian Sandler established Riley’s Way in 2014 in memory of their daughter Riley Hannah Sandler.
