Powered by a collaborative spirit and inspired by their journey as mothers, these moms are reshaping the local business landscape.
Huron has one of Michigan’s highest chronic absenteeism rates: 68.6 percent of its students in the 2024–25 school year—more than two-thirds—missed at least 10 percent, or eighteen days, of class. Ann Arbor Public Schools’ other two traditional high schools aren’t much better: Pioneer’s rate was 63.7 percent, and Skyline’s was 61.6 percent. (Chronic absenteeism rates include excused and unexcused absences, but neither AAPS nor the state collects data on how many of each are occurring.)
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A recent report by the Washtenaw County Continuum of Care (CoC), a major player working to coordinate local efforts to end homelessness, paints an urgent picture: as of December 2025, at least 842 people in the county are experiencing homelessness—a 42 percent increase since 2024.
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Menopause and the menopause transition “remains one of the most overlooked and underserved areas in medicine,” according to the Menopause Society, a nonprofit focused on educating health care professionals.
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Elisabeth Thoburn has covered her home on Silver Lake in Pinckney with second-quality tiles from Motawi, creating a home-sized work of art—and a love letter to local clay.
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A dispirited Praveena Ramaswami sits behind her steering wheel offering, yet again, her arguments against the placement of the new Thurston Elementary School. It required the destruction of key ecological features of the beloved Thurston Nature Center (TNC); it’s being built on soft peat; it all happened without adequate notice to, input from, or consideration of the neighborhood.
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“You see vehicles that look suspicious with dark windows and [when] you look inside you see [people] in bullet-proof vests and you know, it’s them: its ICE,” says a community advocate who wishes to remain anonymous. “It’s happening in our lovely county. It’s here.”
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After forty-three years, eleven months, and twenty-three days, Billy Cole was released from prison. It was 2019 and he found himself scrambling, trying to find his footing. He took on factory work, delivery work, anything he could find to bring in money and avoid returning to prison.
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It was a bright autumn morning for the more than 100,000 people driving to the Big House for the University of Michigan’s October 4 homecoming game against Wisconsin. Some sixteen miles west, about 250 others gathered at Chelsea Community Fairgrounds for a very different athletic contest: the annual Rode To Hell gravel bike race.
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On a chilly mid-November Wednesday morning, volunteers from Food Gatherers assembled in a parking lot at Briarwood Mall, outside JCPenney. It was the second in a series of four hastily announced food distributions following a freeze in federal food benefits.
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But there’s an imminent threat to promising mRNA research: massive cuts to the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposed by President Trump, which researcher Nils Walter says “would really devastate the progress that can be made.”
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In December, U-M announced its plans to partner with the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to create a $1.25 billion “state-of-the-art” computing and AI research facility. Construction is expected to begin in 2027 and wrap up in 2031. The facility is tentatively sited on nearly 150 acres of land on Textile Rd. in Ypsilanti Twp.
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On November 4, voters decide whether to raise property taxes by 1 mill for the next decade. The money raised—$25 million the first year—would support CTE programs like this one. Administrators can talk ad nauseam about the power of giving young people a variety of opportunities for instruction in specific career fields, but it’s student testimonials that have been front and center in the campaign to push through the millage. Yet the debate over the ballot question isn’t so much about support for or opposition to CTE as it is whether a new tax ought to pay for it.
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Something was off about Kevin. He was affectionate and cheerful like most toddlers, his mother Kerry Kafafian recalls, but “he was doing a movement which we later understood to be a seizure.” A pediatric neurologist determined that he had Lennox–Gastaut syndrome, a rare form of epilepsy that causes severe cognitive impairment.
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Over the summer, a neighborhood vanished. In the hilly rectangle bounded by S. Division, Hill, Fifth Ave., and E. Madison, backhoes methodically crushed scores of wood-frame houses, a handful of small apartment buildings, and the old Fingerle Lumber sales room.
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“My dad was kind of never really in my life, and my mom, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia before I was even born,” says Michelle Hanke. “That was just really, really difficult.
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My first Ann Arbor Observer article appeared in the October 1980 issue. This October will be my last as editor. Our deputy editor, Brooke Black, is already planning her first issue as editor-in-chief in November. Publisher Patricia Garcia is also retiring and will be succeeded by our media director, Danielle Jones.
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Pioneer High at 3:01 p.m. has the feel of a busy commuter airport. Students pour out of classrooms shouldering backpacks, swinging musical instrument cases, laughing and chatting. Many are holding cell phones.
Those phones are a point of contention at all levels of the education system: from individual classrooms to the school district, and all the way up to the Michigan legislature.
As move-in began this August, Vic Village South’s website advertised, “Leasing Now Open for 2025–26!” Social media ads announced, “We have 1, 2, 3, and 4-Bedroom apartments available!”
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