Washington's legislature adjourned its 2023 regular session with a new two-year state budget, alongside dozens of policy changes focused on housing, health care and public safety – and a surprising last-minute bill failure.Read More
A recent salmon field trip has helped students become more curious about salmon.Read More
A lawsuit was filed in Benton County Superior court this week against the Richland WA school district, school board and three individual members of the school board, alleging violations of the Open Public Meetings Act. Read More
Richland Washington public schools were in an emergency closure Wednesday, and will be closed again Thursday.Read More
School Resource Officers should be following the state’s vaccination mandate. But that isn’t the case for some officers who serve schools in Benton County.Read More
In several areas of the state, school resource officers are contracted employees from sheriff’s departments. Pierce and Benton county both supply sheriff deputies to local school districts as school resource officers. In the Kiona Benton school district, the school resource officer is sheriff deputy Brad Klippert, who is also a state representative. Read More
More Murrow News Stories PULLMAN, WASH. (Murrow News 8) – We continue to hear about it, the staffing shortages schools are facing across the country, but do we understand it? […]Read More
Tens of thousands of public school students in Washington state returned to classes this month in school buildings judged to be at risk of collapse in a strong earthquake. A new report to the state Legislature prepared by state geologists and a structural engineering firm gave the lowest possible seismic safety rating to more than 90 percent of the school buildings Read More
Washington authorities said Thursday all schools in the state must provide full-time, in-person education for students for the 2021-22 school year and that students and staff will still be required to wear masks.Read More
The Washington Legislature has approved a measure to ban the use of Native American names, symbols and images as school mascots, logos and team names at most public schools in Washington.Read More
The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it will spend $10 billion to expand testing for schools, to aid in the president's goal to get schools open once again.Read More
President Biden has said many times that he wants most schools to be open by his 100th day in office, April 30. And on Friday, Feb. 12, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines intended to help schools operate in person safely. But some argue these guidelines will do little to promote school openings.Read More
A fresh round of federal aid will soon be flowing to Washington businesses and individuals hit hard by the COVID pandemic. On Friday, Gov. Jay Inslee signed into law a $2.2 billion relief package funded with money approved by Congress in December.Read More
Ever since the pandemic closed the nation's schools in March 2020, there has been no official national source for understanding where schools have reopened, how many hours of live instruction students are getting online and just how unequal the access to learning has been over the past 11 months.Read More
News reports and social media feeds have been crowded lately with demands by teachers in Seattle and elsewhere around the state and the country to be vaccinated before they step from behind the computer screen and back into the classroom. Vaccine availability is something not even the governor can guarantee, but teachers are in one of the groups in line for vaccination in Read More
As school districts across the state scramble to transition their classrooms safely from the online world back to the real world, they may benefit from the advice of the dozens of Washington districts that welcomed students back into their halls this past fall.Read More
Since the beginning of this pandemic, experts and educators have feared that open schools would spread the coronavirus further, which is why so many classrooms remain closed. But a new, nationwide study suggests reopening schools may be safer than previously thought, at least in communities where the virus is not already spreading out of control.Read More
Some school districts are reporting a higher level of failing grades this fall. A report from the consultant McKinsey & Company estimated that students were three months behind in math when they started the school year. And another study said learning losses were minimal, but left out many students from the analysis.Read More
Case numbers have shot up lately in rural America, which skews older and tends to have huge inequality gaps in health care. But there's still resistance in places such as Bruneau, Idaho, which has a population of 500. Here, there's also a pervasive sense in the community that kids need to be physically in classrooms for their education and well-being yet stiff opposition Read More
“There really is relatively small additional risk if you have good safety and health protocols," the governor said Wednesday. "We see it as our task to make sure that when our students go back, when our educators go back that we follow these sound practices of health and safety protocols to keep people safe. When we do that, we now have both that scientific data I’ve just Read More
Budget cuts + rising pandemic costs + zero federal relief = a school funding crisis. Back in May, school funding experts predicted a looming financial disaster for the nation's K-12 schools.Read More
Idaho Gov. Brad Little says individual school districts will decide whether to bring students back to the classroom this fall. But he says the expectation is that schools will not be closed for an extended period.Read More
Gov. Jay Inslee said Wednesday that schools in the majority of Washington’s counties should strongly consider online-only learning for students this fall due to COVID-19 and canceling or postponing sports and all other in-person extracurricular activities. In Idaho, Gov. Brad Little is urging schools to reopen where it's deemed safe.Read More
In recent days, health officers in Snohomish and Thurston counties have recommended against reopening school buildings this fall. And some districts, including the Olympia district, have already announced they will stick with remote learning for now. Read More
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee is responding to President Donald Trump’s threat to penalize states that don’t reopen schools this fall. At a news conference Thursday, Inslee pushed back hard on the president and said the state won’t be bullied.Read More
With the first day of school less than six weeks away, the Idaho State Board of Education on Thursday unanimously adopted school reopening guidelines that set expectations for students to return to school in the fall.Read More
Travis Bristol, an assistant professor of education at the University of California at Berkeley, explains how teacher training and the presence of Black teachers can help reshape education.Read More
Reclaim Idaho suspended face-to-face signature gathering for the initiative on March 18, days after Idaho reported its first case of coronavirus. The group sued on June 8, saying that Gov. Brad Little and Secretary of State Lawerence Denney refused to provide the group an alternative path to pursuing a voter initiative during the pandemic.Read More
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos signaled she is standing firm on her intention to reroute millions of dollars in coronavirus aid money to K-12 private school students.Read More
Earlier this year, there was only one electric school bus in the entire state of Washington. By this fall, the electric school bus fleet should be vastly expanding. Forty new buses may transport students in districts throughout the state possibly starting in the fall — assuming in-person classes are back on.Read More
Administrators in Idaho’s largest districts say they’ve lost touch with up to 5 percent of their students during the transition to remote learning. These families haven’t responded to texts, calls, emails and sometimes home visits from administrators.Read More
As the world has shifted, so has education. Teachers and schools have risen to the occasion to deliver lessons and learning from afar. They have moved classes online, and some […]Read More
As of Thursday afternoon, 26 states, representing about half of the nation's public school students, have recommended or ordered their schools to remain closed for the rest of the academic year, according to a tally by Education Week. The closures affect about 25 million of the nation's 50.8 million public school students.Read More
Gov. Jay Inslee announced Monday that all Washington K-12 schools will remain closed for the remainder of this school year and will shift to a distance learning model.Read More
Washington school districts — and some in Idaho — have closed their doors for the foreseeable future, due to coronavirus precautions. But most are providing free meals to students and non-students alike. Here's a round-up of what some Inland Northwest districts are doing.Read More
The rule will give administrators more leeway in serving up white breads, biscuits, tortillas and white pastas by requiring that only half of the grains served in school meals each week be whole-grain rich. Read More
