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      Why Period Products Aren’t Widely Provided in Schools

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      A lawsuit against the New York City Department of Education alleges that not providing free products amounts to discrimination.Alisa Nudar was in the middle of her math exam when she realized she had unexpectedly started her period.Nudar raised her hand and asked for permission to go to the bathroom. When she got there, she found that she had bled through her underwear. She didn’t have any period products with her, and there were none in the bathroom. “I kept asking people who were coming in and they were, like, Oh, I’m so sorry, I don’t have any,” Nudar said. “And already 10 minutes had passed.”She walked out of the bathroom looking for a better solution and bumped into a friend who ran back to her classroom to get one of her own pads.All of that searching took about 15 minutes, Nudar said — wasted time that she could have put into her exam. Back then, in 2021, Nudar was a freshman at Bard High School Early College in New York City. And legally there should have been tampons and pads in the school bathroom, provided for free by the New York City Department of Education.Now a nonprofit organization called Period Law and an anonymous student are suing the Education Department for not providing those products in schools, a failure that, according to the legal complaint, effectively amounts to discrimination against menstruating people.In 2016, New York City became the first jurisdiction in the country to pass a law mandating every school to be stocked with free period products. The law paved the way for other legislators to pass their own versions of a similar law. Today, 28 states and the District of Columbia have laws on free period products in schools.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For Tina Louise, Escape, Finally, From ‘Gilligan’s Island’

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      Ms. Louise would prefer to not to talk about Ginger, her breathy sitcom character from the 1960s. Luckily, to the children she tutors, she’s just Ms. Tina.The green-eyed TV star with the beauty mark on her cheek shows up at a school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan every Wednesday. For an hour, Ms. Tina, as the students and teachers call her, devotes herself to a pair of 7-year-olds who are struggling with reading. They’ll go through whatever books the teacher gives her, like “All Aboard!” or “How to Catch a Witch.” When her time is up, she’ll head home.None of the children will have any idea that Ginger from “Gilligan’s Island” — in real life, the actress Tina Louise — just spent the best 60 minutes of her week with them.Ms. Louise does not like to talk about the television show that made her a household name. She has no desire to revisit the years between 1964 and 1967, when she was marooned with six oddballs and a trunk full of slinky, sequined gowns.Through its run of 98 episodes, “Gilligan’s Island” was a prime-time success and became a Gen X touchstone in reruns. (The question of “Ginger or Mary Ann?” can still evoke passionate debate among men of a certain age.) As for Ms. Louise, she can barely utter the name of the program, referring to it as “G.I.” or “The Series.”CBS, via Getty ImagesIt’s not that she regrets it, although she and the cast never received residuals. “I’m very grateful for all the things that have happened to me and the opportunities that I’ve had,” she said in a recent conversation from her modest one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. She is the show’s last living cast member, and she recently celebrated a birthday she’d prefer not to discuss. (“I’m 29,” she said coyly.) She still has the signature beauty that made her famous, now on display in jeans and a black T-shirt instead of fancy gowns.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Fact-Checking Trump’s Justice Dept. Speech on Crime, Immigration and His Cases

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      President Trump repeated a number of well-trodden falsehoods on Friday in a grievance-fueled speech at the Justice Department, veering from prepared remarks to single out lawyers and prosecutors and assail the criminal investigations into him.His remarks, billed as a policy address, were wide-ranging, touching on immigration, crime and the price of eggs.Here’s a fact-check.Mr. Trump’s misleading claims touched on:His legal troublesThe 2020 electionBiden and classified documentsThe Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the CapitolParents, anti-abortion activists and CatholicsImmigration and crimeEgg pricesHis legal troublesWhat Was Said“They weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to try and thwart the will of the American people.”“They spied on my campaign, launched one hoax and disinformation operation after another, broke the law on a colossal scale, persecuted my family, staff and supporters, raided my home Mar-a-Lago and did everything within their power to prevent me from becoming the president of the United States.”This lacks evidence. Mr. Trump’s claims refer to a wide array of investigations and criminal cases that occurred before, during and after his first term as president.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Teenagers Say Girls Are Equal to Boys in School, or Are Ahead

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      Reflecting a generational change, two Pew surveys show boys tend to feel discouraged in the classroom, and are less likely than girls to pursue college.In the 1980s and 1990s, boys still dominated American classrooms. They outscored girls in math and science, they raised their hands more often and they got more attention from teachers, data showed.That’s not the reality for today’s students. More than half of teenagers say that boys and girls are now mostly equal in school. And significant shares say that girls have advantages over boys — that they get better grades, have more leadership roles and speak up more in class, according to a Pew Research Center survey of teens nationwide published Thursday.Boys are more likely to be disruptive, get into fights or have problems with drugs or alcohol, the teenagers said. And strikingly, boys said they’re much less likely to be college-bound: 46 percent of boys said they planned to attend a four-year college, compared with 60 percent of girls.“What happens to a society when there’s such disparity between men and women in educational outcomes?” a researcher said. Kendrick Brinson for The New York TimesTeenagers aren’t often surveyed by high-quality pollsters. Their responses in the Pew survey reflect other data on educational outcomes. Boys today have more challenges than girls in school as early as kindergarten. Girls have narrowed gaps with boys in math (though they have widened since pandemic school closures), and girls outperform boys in reading. Boys graduate from high school and attend college at lower rates.Boys’ struggles in school could have long-term consequences, researchers say. The share of men working has declined. Nearly half of Republican men say American society has negative views of men, beginning with their experiences as boys in school. Young men’s feelings of disconnection played a role in the election — this group swung toward President Trump, perhaps in part because he promised to restore their status in American society.

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      Climate Change Made South Sudan Heat Wave More Likely, Study Finds

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      Years of war and food insecurity in the region made the extreme heat especially dangerous.After a blistering February heat wave in South Sudan’s capital city caused dozens of students to collapse from heat stroke, officials closed schools for two weeks. It was the second time in less than a year that the country’s schools closed to protect young people from the deadly effects of extreme heat.Climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels in rich nations, made at least one week of that heat wave 10 times as likely, and 2 degrees Celsius hotter, according to a new study by World Weather Attribution. Temperatures in some parts of the region soared above 42 degrees Celsius, or 107 degrees Fahrenheit, in the last week of February.The analysis used weather data, observations and climate models to get the results, which have not been peer reviewed but are based on standardized methods.South Sudan, in the tropical band of East Africa, was torn apart by a civil war that led to independence from Sudan in 2011. It’s also one of the countries least responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that are heating up the globe. “The continent has contributed a tiny fraction of global emissions, but is bearing the brunt of climate change,” said Joyce Kimutai, a researcher at the Center for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London.Heat waves are one of the deadliest extreme weather events and have become more frequent and more severe on a warming planet. But analysis methods connecting heat to mortality vary between and within countries, and death tolls can be underreported and are often unknown for months after an event.Prolonged heat is particularly dangerous for children, older adults and pregnant women. For the last three weeks, extreme heat has settled over a large region of continental Eastern Africa, including parts of Kenya and Uganda. Residents have been told to stay indoors and drink water, a difficult directive for countries where many people work outdoors, electricity is sporadic, access to clean water is difficult and modest housing means there are few cooling systems.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Do Republicans Want to Dismantle the Education Department?

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      President Trump’s fixation reinvigorated the debate over the role of the federal government in education, and created a powerful point of unity between the factions of his party.Two months after the Education Department officially opened its doors in 1980, Republicans approved a policy platform calling on Congress to shut it down.Now, more than four decades later, President Trump may come closer than any other Republican president to making that dream a reality.Though doing away with the agency would require an act of Congress, Mr. Trump has devoted himself to the goal, and is said to be preparing an executive order with the aim of dismantling it.Mr. Trump’s fixation has reinvigorated the debate over the role of the federal government in education, creating a powerful point of unity between the ideological factions of his party: traditional establishment Republicans and die-hard adherents of his Make America Great Again movement.“This is a counterrevolution against a hostile and nihilistic bureaucracy,” said Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank and a trustee of New College of Florida.Here is how the party got to this moment.Conservatives make their argument.During his 1982 State of the Union address, President Ronald Reagan called on Congress to eliminate both the Energy Department and the Education Department.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Let Students Finish the Whole Book. It Could Change Their Lives.

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      Veronyka JelinekIn her memoir, Dorothy Allison writes, “Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love.”Throughout my teaching career at independent schools, which began during the Clinton administration, I’ve also been telling students that reading a story all the way through is an act of love. It takes stillness and receptivity to realize this, it takes a willingness to enter the life of someone you’ll never meet, and it requires great practice.It’s easy to join the hand-wringing chorus, blaming TikTok’s corn drill challenge, Jake Paul and their ilk for the diminuendo of Dickens. But we cannot let reading become another bygone practice. In their more than eight hours of screen time a day, on average, students navigate a galaxy of mediated experiences; schools need to be a bastion of the analog experience of the physical book.The study of English involves more than reading. It includes written expression and the cultivation of an authentic voice. But the comprehension of literature, on which the study of English is based, is rooted in the pleasure of reading. Sometimes there will be a beam of light that falls on a room of students collectively leaning into a story, with only the scuffing sounds of pages, and it’s as though all our heartbeats have slowed. But we have introduced so many antagonists to scrape against this stillness that reading seems to be impractical.The test scores released at the end of last month by the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveal disturbing trend lines for the future of literacy in our country. Thirty-three percent of eighth graders scored “below basic” on reading skills, meaning they were unable to determine the main idea of a text or identify differing sides of an argument. This was the worst result in the exam’s 32-year history. To make matters worse, or perhaps to explain how we got here, the assessment reported that in 2023 only 14 percent of students said they read for fun almost every day, a drop of 13 percentage points since 2012.In its attempt to make English more relevant, the National Council of Teachers of English — devoted to the improvement of language arts instruction — announced in 2022 that it would widen its doors to the digital and mediated world. The aim was to retreat from the primacy of the written word and invite more ideas to be represented by images and multimedia. “It behooves our profession, as stewards of the communication arts, to confront and challenge the tacit and implicit ways in which print media is valorized above the full range of literacy competencies students should master,” the council said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An Excruciating Wait for Abundant Life Christian School Families After Shooting

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      Inside Abundant Life Christian School, a chilling message came over the intercom late Monday morning: “Lockdown. This is not a drill.”Teachers herded students out of view, a sixth-grader recalled. Then there was banging, and screaming. “Everybody started freaking out,” said the student, Breken Ives.The sirens came minutes later.“Police car after police car,” said John Diaz de Leon, a retiree in his 60s who lives near the school in Madison, Wis., and who soon headed outside to see what was bringing so many squad cars to usually quiet Buckeye Road.It would be hours before anyone knew any of the details that the police disclosed in a series of news conferences — including that the shooter was a student at the small private school, and that a teacher and a fellow student had been killed and six others injured.Mr. Diaz de Leon had tuned into a police scanner and heard the words “triage” and “D.O.A.” — dead on arrival. Outside the school, he watched as two police officers with long guns drawn approached the school building, leading a police dog. Soon, groups of students began running out, some coatless and holding hands.All around Madison, parents began to rush toward the school. One father, Mike Brube, was blocks away at work, he said, when he saw the police cruisers screaming by, sirens blaring.He drove straight to the school where his seventh-grader, Angel, had been enrolled throughout childhood. “The school is Christian, and it’s like a family place,” Mr. Brube said.Viktoriya Gonzales was among the parents who waited anxiously near the school for hours to be reunited with their children. Some of the students were held back to talk with police officers as the authorities began to investigate.Ms. Gonzales had heard from other students that her son, 12, was safe but “severely traumatized, because he was right by the shooter.”“That’s all I know,” she said. More