Author: paige laevy

In the rural outskirts of Villavicencio, the capital of Meta department in Colombia’s eastern lowlands, a school is situated on a plot of land that doesn’t appear to be much from the road, somewhere past the Caracolí condominium. Then you get nearer. The sports courts appear, the green areas expand, and in the distance, kids are studying English in an environment that seems purposefully cut off from the bustle of the city. This is Stanford School, and although it shares a name with one of the most prominent universities in the world, it came to that identity on its own…

Shaquille O’Neal returned to Baton Rouge in the spring of 2000 to complete what he had begun, eight years after leaving Louisiana State University for the NBA draft and four NBA seasons with the Orlando Magic. After earning his Bachelor of General Studies with a minor in political science, he crossed a graduation stage at LSU wearing a cap and gown and told the audience that he could now go find a real job. Phil Jackson, his coach at the time, allowed him to skip a home game. People laughed at that statement about the real job. There was no…

Round Rock, Texas, is one of those places that had to develop infrastructure to keep up with its rapid growth. When the Williamson County government signed the documents creating Round Rock ISD in 1913, there were just two schools in the district. It now employs about 6,340 people, covers about 110 square miles, serves about 47,000 students across 60 campuses, and runs on a budget of almost half a billion dollars. Over the course of a century, the district changed from being a two-school rural area to one of the biggest in Texas, but the majority of the weight came…

Bryce Harper began hitting in the Bat-R-Up batting cage in Las Vegas when he was six years old. not engaging in practice. striking. In the sense that teachers who had witnessed thousands of young athletes took a step back and searched for the appropriate words to describe what they were witnessing. “The way the ball came off the bat was something I’ve never heard or seen at that age,” said Harper’s eighth-grade teacher, Buck Thomas. Almost everyone who came into contact with Harper before the rest of the world knew his name repeats that description in different ways. The noise.…

Located in the center of Acadiana, a region of south-central Louisiana known for its French Creole ancestry, cuisine, music, and unique way of life that doesn’t always translate well to the metrics used by education researchers in Massachusetts or California, is Lafayette, Louisiana. Therefore, it is noteworthy that the Lafayette Parish School System is outperforming expectations not only within Louisiana but also against school districts nationwide, according to a national academic report created by researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities. Lafayette Parish students outperform roughly 64 percent of American districts in math achievement and 61 percent in math growth, according…

Fort Myers’ Hammond Stadium is one of those locations with more history than its small size would imply. For a few days every May, it serves as the hub of Florida high school baseball, a sport that, if you haven’t noticed, operates at a level of drama and execution that surpasses much of professional baseball. The majority of the year, it serves as the Minnesota Twins’ spring training facility. That was brought home to me this past week. Three games for the championship. Three entirely distinct tales. There is one thing that unites them all: this is how the sport…

The door frames in a gymnasium in Juneau, Alaska, are so low that a six-foot-nine teenager had to duck to get through them. Door jams are something Carlos Boozer Jr. recalls. He remembers them with something akin to reverence rather than frustration, much like someone remembers the minute physical details of a place that transformed everything. He declared, “That place is sacred to me,” following his September 2025 induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. He was referring to Juneau-Douglas High School, which is located in a city that most Americans couldn’t find on a map and is…

Court dockets in Arizona and California were occupied for almost eight years by a legal dispute involving the University of Metaphysical Sciences, which never resulted in a trial, a verdict, or a judgment against the institution. The last case, Case No. 4:21-cv-08066-KAW in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was dismissed with prejudice on May 12, 2025. There was no settlement. There was no liability discovered. There was no award of damages. Finality was the only outcome of the dismissal, and apparently that was sufficient for a school that had been defending itself since 2017. Christine…

A few years ago, on a cloudy afternoon, a man by the name of Pancho sat in front of a computer screen in a small lab room at UCSF and watched his own ideas come to life. Not in a symbolic sense. In actuality. He was paralyzed and voiceless after a stroke years prior, and the sentences that were forming on the monitor were the ones he had attempted—and failed—to speak out loud. The machine’s comprehension of him wasn’t the only thing that made this moment unique. It was because it could understand him in two different languages. Dr. Edward…

The most recent figures from Yango Group contain a tiny, revealing detail. Yasmina, the typical Arabic-English voice assistant user, spoke to the device twenty-two times a day in the fourth quarter of 2025. That figure increased to forty-four on busy days. That isn’t how someone using a smart speaker to run a single errand would behave. That is a household member’s rhythm. According to Yango’s data, which was made public this month, Yasmina’s daily active users increased sixfold over the same quarter last year. The overall number of interactions increased by over five times. These kinds of numbers are simple…