At the end of the school year students rally to the cry: “No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks.”
Then, sooner than they can believe, it’s the beginning of the school year. There are no more rallying cries, only gleaming white tennis shoes squeaking on freshly waxed floors, new pencil cases full of sharpened number 2s, and backpacks filled with newly issued textbooks.
College students move into their dorm rooms or apartments, trying to make sure they’ve got just the schedule they want, the one that lets them have Fridays off or no classes in the morning.
But this year will be a little different. Memphis City Schools just completed the largest school construction project in the city’s history and will open nine new schools on August 20th. Tuition for undergrads at the University of Memphis went up 15 percent from last year; 20 percent for grad students. And the Gateway test and the new version of the GED will make getting a high school diploma, or the high school equivalency, a little more difficult.
Staffers Mary Cashiola, Chris Przybyszewski, and Hannah Walton contributed stories on these topics, as well as one on a subject the entire country is talking about because of the First Daughters: underage drinking.
Read on. You might learn something.
