Bob CollinsWhen his dad, Rey, died in the spring of 2015, Sam Heras, a 17-year-old, had to give up football at his Irondale high school to help support his mother. They’d been notified they were losing their house. No time for games. Last week, his mother died. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Education
Today’s must-read item comes from Mara Gottfried at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, who tells the story of Ali Bility, a 17-year-old who was in the starting lineup last night when Como Park’s football squad took the field.
Suffering from depression, Bility had attempted suicide last winter. Read more →
Alice Seagren didn’t mix words in her criticism of the back-patting over the news this week that the high school graduation rate in the U.S. reached an all-time high of 83 percent in the 2014-2015 school year. Read more →
The occasional tales of sportsmanship on this blog are, indeed, heartwarming. But it must also be acknowledged that with every yin, there is often a yang.
Tyler Ohmann, of the Morrison County Record, found the yang at the homecoming football game in Royalton earlier this month when Upsala Swanville came calling. Read more →
George Fricovsky, 90, never really liked school very much. But he had other things to do when he was 18. Like getting drafted into the Army. Read more →
Ben Hildre says he wouldn’t have done it if the gorilla costume he normally wears for some annual team tradition hadn’t been damaged. Read more →
In St. Charles, Minn., gateway to Whitewater, there lives a young woman who was raised properly. Read more →
For the second time in a week, a college campus is getting a lesson on constitutionally protected speech that many find distasteful.
Read more →
KARE 11’s Boyd Huppert, of course, has found another angel walking among us and, as it turns out, he owns a bus company.
He’s Jon Held, who has the bus contract for the Kenyon-Wanamingo School District. Read more →
The student body at Willmar Senior High School is 57 percent white, 23 percent Hispanic, 18 percent black and 2 percent Asian, and it wasn’t a big deal at all to the kids when Anisa Abdulahi was named the first Somali-American homecoming queen at the school, West Central Tribune’s Linda Vanderwerf writes. Read more →
University of Minnesota students get a lesson: A political message that people may find offensive doesn’t cross the constitutional free speech line. Read more →
The story of Wrenshall’s girls basketball team is not only the story of how a small number of kids showed up in the face of certain losses; it was a metaphor for rural Minnesota and rural America. The story might be nearing an end. Read more →
The driver of a bus that got caught halfway across a highway in Cambridge has resigned after video of the incident was posted on Facebook. Read more →
A history teacher in North Carolina is bound to get into some hot water for teaching kids about history, specifically the First Amendment of the Constitution which gives the right to burn, cut, or step on the American flag.
So that’s what Lee Francis did at his high school on Monday. Read more →
Sometimes you just have to stand for something.
Stacy Yannazzo Koltiska, a school cafeteria worker in Pennsylvania’s Canon-McMillan School District, stands for something: feeding kids without shaming the poor. Read more →