Founder Pat Montgomery established Clonlara School in 1967 to “allow children to be themselves, free to explore their interests and develop into individuals who [feel] free in their own skin,” she told the Observer in 2017. Through what it calls Full Circle Learning (FCL), Clonlara empowers its students to pursue topics that spark their curiosity, and learn what they learn along the way.
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Three Pioneer High School moms have joined forces to fund driver’s education classes for thirty-six Pioneer students in the upcoming school year. It’s a pilot project for their new Drive Forward Foundation, which aspires to provide fully funded driver’s education for underserved students throughout Washtenaw County.
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On May 3, then-U-M president Santa Ono beamed as he sat on stage at Michigan Stadium for commencement ceremonies. Next to him was honorary doctorate recipient Derek Jeter, who gave up a Michigan baseball scholarship to play for the New York Yankees, but has remained a true-blue Wolverine. Unbeknownst to Jeter or the audience of parents and graduates, Ono was about to change colors.
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Fayroian headed Greenhills School twice—from 2005–2012 and again since 2018. Since then, the independent school for grades 6–12 has grown from 520 students to 720. They’ve had to cap enrollment, he says, and have “long waiting lists.” Now he’s overseeing a plan that aims to add 180 younger students on a second campus: the building on Platt Rd. that’s now Summers-Knoll School, a progressive preK–5 independent.
Read MoreSchools throughout the country responded, some by shuttering diversity programs, some by renaming webpages to make their pursuit of DEI less obvious, and some by resisting.
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This year, the U-M saw a 24.5 percent increase in applications from first-generation students; they currently make up 12 percent of the undergraduate population. But the university’s relationship with first-gens hasn’t always been supportive.
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As generative artificial intelligence continues its colonization of the digital world, from search engines to software, concerns are being raised about its energy consumption: the data centers that train and run genAI models are power hogs. A December U.S. Department of Energy report cites genAI as the main reason data centers’ share of U.S. energy consumption more than doubled from 2018 to 2023—and may more than double again by 2030.
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Good news for the one in five people who have difficulty processing written words: Michigan now has two strong laws governing how schools screen for dyslexia and train teachers to respond to it. And it has them largely because of Ann Arbor school board member and former special ed teacher Susan Ward Schmidt.
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In mid-December, when Concordia University Ann Arbor issued a press release announcing the school would consolidate its operations at its North Building on Plymouth Rd. and away from its sprawling, lush campus along Geddes, few were surprised.
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“I feel pretty good,” says AAPS board president Torchio Feaster of the November election results. “We elected a lot of good people in this community.”
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The decline in volunteers adds to the challenges facing the Ann Arbor Public Schools, which are reeling in the wake of a budget deficit and staff cuts. “It’s not like there’s a parent at home anymore,” says Gina Maksimchuk, who teaches kindergarten oung fives at Abbot. And that means “fewer people are available to volunteer.”
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The November 5 election is about the schools’ past, present, and future—the current board’s firing of superintendent Jeanice Swift last summer, the discovery of a $25 million hole the budget in March, the hiring of Jazz Parks as the new superintendent in June, and the need to grow enrollment to keep the schools financially sound in the future.
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After a contentious lawsuit, Gracie the Bernedoodle is back with the teacher she lived with during her stint as a therapy dog at Wines Elementary School.
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Just before kick-off at the AFC Ann Arbor women’s May 19 soccer match against Kalamazoo FC at Pioneer High School’s Hollway Field, fifteen-year-old Izzy Sutton and two U-M students received formal recognition as female leaders and role models. Sutton, tall and athletic, was a 2023 Washtenaw County Young Citizen of the Year, and has won state and national service awards for her work, which has included raising money for bird and turtle rescue by selling her own line of notecards. Sutton has long called for eliminating single-use plastic water bottles at the Ann Arbor Public Schools, petitioning the school board and administration since fifth grade. Most end up in landfills and as trash in the environment.
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A week after school let out in June, the Ann Arbor Board of Education voted to release a devastating report on the mistakes leading to a multimillion-dollar hole in the district’s budget.
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The U-M Law School’s Public Defender Training Institute, led by Primus with assistance from three alumni, prepares students for the realities of work— and life—as a public defender.
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Emerson celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in April at Michigan Stadium. “We raised a significant amount of money,” Beckerleg emails, “with the bulk of it going to support our financial aid program—including a new middle-school scholarship in honor of Jean Navarre.
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The assembly controls a budget of about $1.2 million that traditionally supports dozens of student organizations. Chowdhury and Atkinson, who spent nights at the encampment on the Diag in April and May, want to give it to Palestinian groups instead.
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At a special meeting in early April, the school board voted 4–3 to have superintendent Jazz Parks warn most of the district’s unions of impending layoffs. They did so, president Torchio Feaster says, because they needed “to send a realistic plan to the state” for how to address a $25 million shortfall.
Read MoreQ. The U-M is always growing, and when it purchases property in the city, it is removed from the city’s tax rolls. Does the U-M make any payments to the city for services such as police and fire protection, road maintenance,...
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