Author: Reporter

It is a Monday in September, but with schools closed, the three children in the Pruente household have nowhere to be. Callahan, 13, contorts herself into a backbend as 7-year-old Hudson fiddles with a balloon and 10-year-old Keegan plays the piano. Like a growing number of students around the U.S., the Pruente children are on a four-day school schedule, a change instituted this fall by their district in Independence, Missouri. To the kids, it’s terrific. “I have a three-day break of school!” exclaimed Hudson. But their mom, Brandi Pruente, who teaches French in a neighboring district in suburban Kansas...

On a breezy July morning in South Seattle, a dozen elementary-aged students ran math relays behind an elementary school. One by one, they raced to a table, where they scribbled answers to multiplication questions before sprinting back to high-five their teammate. These students are part of a summer program run by the nonprofit School Connect WA, designed to help them catch up on math and literacy skills lost during the pandemic. There are 25 students in the program, and all of them are one to three grades behind. One 11-year-old boy could not do two-digit subtraction. Thanks to the...

Lawmakers in Congress are trying to forge an agreement on sending a new round of wartime assistance to Ukraine. But to succeed, they will have to find agreement on an issue that has confounded them for decades. Republicans in both chambers of Congress have made clear that they will not support additional aid for Ukraine unless it is paired with border security measures to help manage the influx of migrants at the Mexico-U.S. border. Their demand has injected one of the most contentious issues in American politics into a foreign policy debate that was already difficult. TIME IS SHORT...

About four decades ago, when the Environmental Protection Agency was first trying to figure out what to do about lead in drinking water, Ronnie Levin quantified its damage: Roughly 40 million people drank water with dangerous levels of lead, degrading the intelligence of thousands of kids. But new regulations were going to be costly and complicated. So, “instead of trying to deal with it substantively, they just tabled it,” Levin, a former EPA researcher, said of some of her colleagues at the agency in the 1980s. One co-worker, though, leaked Levin’s analysis to the press, igniting a public outcry...

Most U.S. cities would have to replace lead water pipes within 10 years under strict new rules proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency as the Biden administration moves to reduce lead in drinking water and prevent public health crises like the ones in Flint, Michigan, and Washington DC. Millions of people consume drinking water from lead pipes and the agency said tighter standards would improve IQ scores in children and reduce high blood pressure and heart disease in adults. It is the strongest overhaul of lead rules in more than three decades, and will cost billions of dollars. Pulling...