K-12

Racine Unified School District in Wisconsin is offering free credit monitoring and identity protection services to employees after a Dec. 13 cybersecurity incident. Forensic investigators said students were not impacted.

In a survey of 300 students, 32 percent of high schoolers reported pursuing a STEAM career directly because of the Starbase program. That doesn’t include students who were already interested in science.

In her State of the State address this week, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is expected to call for state legislation to address smartphone distractions in schools, but local control remains important to many superintendents.

While many teachers and administrators have reported positive changes after phone bans, students found ways to bypass those rules by slipping calculators or dummy phones into pouches, or switching to smartwatches.

A school board in New Jersey adopted a policy prohibiting its own members from using smart devices during board meetings, aiming to lead by example after adopting phone restrictions for students last September.

A student group at Denham Springs High School won the national Samsung Solve for Tomorrow STEM competition with a project involving sensors to monitor Lake Maurepas and relay data to a public app.

With ed-tech resources removed from the U.S. Department of Education website, experts said state and district leaders may have to rely more on each other and national education groups for future guidance.

Williamsburg-James City County Public Schools in Virginia are back online after a Feb. 9 cyber incident that precluded virtual learning during a snowstorm last week.

More than $20,000 from the Maryland State Department of Education will go toward gifted and talented education programs, including game-based learning software designed to develop analytical thinking skills.

While a proposed bill addressing smartphones in schools makes its way through the Legislature, West Virginia teachers attest to the seriousness of the problem and the benefits of parting students from their phones.

With a team of teachers and an evidence-based approach, virtual tutoring startup Reading Futures is helping upper elementary, middle and high school students with the lowest reading scores in schools across six states.

Mt. Diablo Unified School District in California last year spent $50 million on an energy savings project including HVAC systems. Glitches have forced teachers to wear winter coats as some classrooms dip below 50 degrees.

At the nation's second-largest school system, smartphones can be used on buses to school but not during class, lunch or breaks. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said most teachers and students have embraced the policy.

A North Carolina school district wants the state attorney general to sue the software company PowerSchool over a data breach in December that affected school staff and the Social Security numbers of 910 charter students.

Some school districts have begun using AI to help write RFPs while vendors use it to submit as many bids as possible, but this has generated some concerns about bias, inaccuracies or generally low-quality responses.

Seattle used funds from a technology levy to purchase a new digital curriculum, Illustrative Mathematics, which focuses on conceptual understanding rather than facts and memorization.

North Carolina's largest public school district is reconsidering the possibility of remote learning in lieu of canceling school due to weather, as long as teachers have notice to prepare when a storm is coming.

Blackstone Valley Regional Vocational Technical High School students do virtual learning up to four times a year, sometimes in place of a snow day, because learning to work over Zoom or Teams is part of their education.