In a dank basement of a 113-year-old building in Boston, Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology’s new president Aisha Francis struggled to turn the key to a classroom where — when school is in session — students learn how to fix cars. “They learn to take apart and rebuild a transmission, so they have to be…

For student Alex Putney, the debate over diversity and inclusion efforts at her New Hampshire high school took a turn in July 2020. Local residents had submitted a proposal to SAU 41 to “make anti-racism and equity a strategic priority” in local schools. Putney, one of the few biracial students at the mostly-white Hollis Brookline…

At Idlehurst Elementary School in Somersworth, 9-year old twins Jamya and Jennessa Mercer are huddled over their clipboards, crafting a Mad Libs story about camping. They’re here with three other students and three teachers, four days a week, for the next five weeks. It’s a far cry from the virtual schooling they had much of…

Doug Russell, the IT director for the city of Haverhill, was sleepless in the wee hours of April 8, which turned out to be fortunate. He caught an alert on his phone when the school district’s computer system suddenly crashed. A former firefighter, he hopped in his red pickup to check out the district servers…

Abdulla Aldhaheri is a freshman at Brown University, but he’s never actually been to the hilltop campus in Providence, R.I. The pandemic meant he started college remotely, from his home in the United Arab Emirates. “I really want to come to campus, I feel disconnected,” Aldhaheri said. Aldhaheri — like other international students — is…

Alex Harris loves his job working with students on the autism spectrum — “my superheroes,” he calls them with a broad smile and a deep laugh — in Boston Public Schools. But the academic transcript Harris needs for a promotion and a raise is being kept from him by the private college he attended because…