Mental health, perhaps more than ever, is a topic of conversation for the masses. Clinical terms like “triggered” and “anxiety” crop up in everyday discussion. Tik Tok channels dedicated to self-help and self-care offer tips on living your best life. And when it comes to young people, public leaders, from doctors to principals are trying new preventive approaches, like tele-therapy, to reach students before they’re in crisis. In the midst of a generational shift on mental health, we wanted to elevate the voices of young people who are thinking deeply about it. This is a conversation on mental health featuring Miseducation interns Wesley Almanzar, Fredlove Deshommes, Jose Santana and Nusrath Uddin. They discuss what mental health means to them and how they navigate the topic in their lives in and out of school.

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As we kick off our first ever spring fundraising drive, one of our student reporters shares what working with The Bell has meant to him.

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Every year The Bell trains a group of high school students from across New York City in audio journalism. These student interns report and produce original stories for the Miseducation podcast. Over the past five months, this year’s reporters have been hard at work on their episodes. The theme of the upcoming season is Questioning the Status Quo. 

Each student picked an aspect of the New York City education system that we’ve all gotten really used to. Things that students have just come to accept as normal.Through in-depth research and reporting, they are making a case for what needs to change. 

On this week’s episode, we’re sharing a preview of what they’ve been working on. 

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Between Clarksdale and Cleveland on a quiet stretch of Highway 61 in the Mississippi Delta lies a town called Mound Bayou.

Mound Bayou has more churches than stoplights, more vacant stores than occupied ones — a place that appears forgotten. But locals — folks who grew up here and stayed — wear these special glasses that allow them to see the town as it used to be.

Put the glasses on and an overgrown lot transforms into the first Olympic size swimming pool available to Black Mississippians. The boarded up brick building on the corner turns into a bustling bank that holds more Black wealth than anywhere else in the state. The crumbling circular drive across the street backs up with traffic into a hospital that delivered more than 100,000 Black babies. For the better part of a century, this unremarkable, hollowed-out town was an oasis of Black self-sufficiency in a state brimming with racial terror.

Last month, during mid-winter break, the Miseducation staff joined The Bell’s executive director Taylor McGraw, who recently moved back to Mississippi, for a week-long road trip from Memphis to New Orleans. We journeyed through barbecue joints, civil rights museums, blues clubs, the cold halls of the Mississippi legislature, and the windy banks of the Mississippi River. Of all the places we stopped, Mound Bayou, this tiny dot on a map, left the biggest mark.

This is the story of Mound Bayou.

To learn more about the Mound Bayou Museum of African American Culture and History, visit moundbayoumuseum.com.

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This episode features “EWA Radio: Student Data Privacy as a Civil Rights Issue,” recorded live on March 9 at the SXSW EDU Conference in Austin, Texas.

Panel description

Schools collect lots of information about students – health records, attendance, grades and disciplinary actions. Many parents aren't aware the data may be shared with others, including private companies or law enforcement, and even analyzed to identify and predict student behavior. Experts explain how some of these seemingly innocuous records have the potential to put students (particularly Black and Hispanic children, students with disabilities and LGBTQ+) on a different life trajectory.

Panelists

Kavitha Cardoza (moderator) — Public Editor, Education Writers Association

Elizabeth Laird — Director, Equity in Civic Technology, Center for Democracy & Technology

Clarence Okoh — Senior Policy Counsel & Just Tech Fellow, Center for Law & Social Policy

Marika Pfefferkorn — Solutions Sustainability Officer, Twin Cities Innvoation Alliance

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In this week’s episode, high school senior and Miseducation intern Wesley Almanzar reflects back on his experience growing up in the New York City school system.

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Coco and Bissiri go to different public high schools, a few miles apart on Manhattan’s west side. One, predominantly white and middle-class. The other predominantly Black and working class. But demographics aside, what about the quality of education? The resources students have or don’t have. The classes. The extracurricular opportunities.

This week, as a follow-up to our two-part series on the persistence of school segregation, we’re re-airing an episode from back in 2018 to illuminate the vast differences in NYC students’ educational experiences—depending on what schools they attend.

You can read the show notes from the original episode here.

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Last week, we traveled back in history to learn about Civil Rights-era efforts to integrate New York City’s segregated schools and we featured a speech from Reverend Milton Galamison, the leader of the 1964 NYC school boycott. In the episode, we fast forward to present day to take a look at what has changed (and what hasn’t) in the fight for integration.

Ash’aa Khan takes us to Queens to hear a conversation about school diversity between NYC schools chancellor David Banks and hosts of the School Colors podcast, Mark Winston-Griffith and Max Freedman.

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It’s February 3, 1964, in New York City, and time is up. An umbrella of civil rights organizations — the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, the New York Urban League and the NAACP — have patiently negotiated and waited… and waited for the Board of Education to submit a thorough plan to integrate the city’s segregated schools. But the plan that comes forward in the 11th hour is weak: no timetable, no serious commitment to change the status quo. 

So, close to half a million students stage a one-day school boycott. They call it Freedom Day. It’s the largest single demonstration of the Civil Rights era, almost twice the size of the March on Washington. And it’s rarely taught or talked about these days.

What prompted the protest? How was northern integration activism received in that era? Hear about it from the boycott’s lead organizer, Reverend Milton Galamison. This episode includes excerpts of a speech he delivered a month after the boycott, on March 5, 1964. Listen to the full speech at The New School Archives and Special Collections.

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Quiz time. Did a human write this episode intro, or was it AI?

So, you may be wondering, what the heck is chatGPT? Well, it's basically a super smart computer program that can understand and respond to human language like a pro. And let me tell you, it's making waves in the education world!

We're going to talk about all the cool ways chatGPT is being used in schools, from helping students learn new languages to writing the most killer essays, this technology is making it easier for students to learn and teachers to teach. But, as with any new technology, there are some potential downsides that we'll also be discussing.

So, grab a notebook and a pen, because you're going to want to take notes on this one, folks!

Hard to tell, right? This week, Miseducation student reporter Bree Campbell digs into the chatGPT debates with NPR reporter Emma Bowman, who’s been covering the impact of the new AI technology on schools.

Oh, and if you guessed human, you’re wrong.

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