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Data Shows Record Low Compliance From Oregon Families With Kindergarten Vaccine Requirements
Oregon Capital Chronicle reported:
A record high number of Oregon kindergartners entered school without required vaccines this year, new state data shows. The Oregon Health Authority released figures on Thursday showing a 10.9% rate of vaccine exemption on nonmedical grounds statewide, compared to 9.7% in the prior school year and 6.9% in the 2021-22 school year.
When combined with medical exemptions — children with severe allergies to vaccine ingredients or weakened immune systems because of disease or chemotherapy — the data shows only 85.6% of current kindergarteners are up to date on required vaccines.
The data comes as pertussis and measles cases have skyrocketed nationwide in the past year, with 23 cases reported in Oregon in 2026. Health officials say a 93% vaccination rate for measles, mumps and rubella is necessary for herd immunity to prevent outbreaks, but more than one-third of Oregon schools with 10 or more students in K-12 don’t meet that baseline requirement.
Big Tech Is Through Harming Our Children — This Is Our Time to Fight Back
For years, America treated the internet like a free speech “Wild West,” assuming the online world should operate with almost no guardrails. Because of this, our nation has operated under two dangerous assumptions about Big Tech: that platforms should be free to publish virtually anything without accountability, and that tech companies should be allowed to design their platforms however they want because “users can always leave.”
Courts, parents and state legislatures are now rejecting both ideas in real time.
We are facing the consequences of applying a totally hands-off philosophy to the digital world. As Jonathan Haidt documents in his book, “The Anxious Generation,” rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, loneliness and suicide among teens, especially girls, skyrocketed after smartphones and social media became dominant around 2012.
Teen girls’ rates of major depressive episodes nearly doubled in the following decade, while emergency room visits for self-harm surged. Parents have been carefully monitoring their children’s physical world, but not their digital activity.
Social Media Giants to Pay $27 Million in School Suit Accord
The world’s biggest social media platforms agreed to pay about $27 million to settle a lawsuit filed by a rural Kentucky school district that alleged their products are addictive and helped create a teen mental health crisis that drained school resources. Meta Platforms Inc., which owns Instagram and Facebook, is paying the school district $9 million, more than any of the other companies, according to documents released under the state’s open records laws.
Snap Inc. and TikTok each agreed to pay $8 million, the records show. Google’s YouTube negotiated a payout of slightly more than $2 million, and was the only company that also agreed to provide the district with training programs to help teachers better use its video product in classrooms. The one-time payments add up to 8% more than Breathitt County School District’s $25 million annual budget.
The settlements, which were announced earlier this month but without financial details, allowed the companies to avert the first trial in the nation over a school district’s complaint, which was scheduled for June 12 in federal court in Oakland, California. Their reprieve, however, will be short-lived: more than 1,300 other school districts have filed similar lawsuits and are awaiting trial. The next is scheduled for February 2027.
Phase Out Diesel School Buses for Children’s Health
On Jan. 30, 2024, I stood at the Baltimore City Public Schools bus depot and watched something I had fought hard to see: the rollout of 25 brand new electric school buses — clean, quiet and ready to carry children like my 15-year-old daughter to school without filling their lungs with diesel exhaust. My daughter has asthma. For years, I’ve watched her struggle. Now, finally, I was seeing something change.
I was there because I had been part of ongoing advocacy efforts to electrify the BCPS bus fleet. “This is not just an environmental issue,” I told the BCPS board. “It is a matter of protecting the health and well-being of our children.”
I meant every word — because Baltimore City is not doing enough. Thousands of BCPS students are still exposed to diesel exhaust every day, either on a yellow school bus or while relying on public transit. The 25 electric buses serve only 350 students, and unfortunately, my daughter is not among them, which breaks my heart.
Brain Scans Reveal 3 ADHD Subtypes, Including a More Extreme Form
The classic image of a child with ADHD is practically a stock character: the spacey kid staring out the window, distracted by squirrels; the fidgeter who can’t sit still, a leg rattling under the desk. But parents and teachers also describe a more extreme type that stumps them: kids who erupt, collapsing onto the floor — screaming, crying, sometimes throwing or breaking things when overwhelmed.
Think Veruca Salt, the rich girl from “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” who demands everything now, or Angelica Pickles from “Rugrats,” whose emotions flip without warning — but turned up several notches. Some physicians and researchers have argued for years that emotional dysregulation is not peripheral to ADHD but a central, overlooked part of the condition.
Yet this symptom does not appear in the formal diagnostic criteria for ADHD in the manual that doctors use to classify mental disorders. That gap has left clinicians without a clear way to categorize what they’re seeing: Are these children best understood as having severe anxiety, as being on the autism spectrum, or as something else entirely? Or does ADHD itself need to be more broadly defined?
A study published in JAMA Psychiatry this year analyzing 1,154 brain scans of children and adolescents offers fresh evidence for reevaluating the medical establishment’s definition of the disorder.
Major Teachers Union Pleads With Elementary Schools to Stop Giving Young Kids AI
Angry parents aren’t the only ones railing against the proliferation of AI in schools. The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teacher’s union in the United States, has now launched a major campaign calling on schools to keep AI and hardware like iPads out of elementary classrooms.
In a buzzy speech at the National Press Club on Wednesday, AFT president Randi Weingarten unveiled ten demands centered around reaffirming human-led instruction. One of the key requests: an immediate ban on AI systems in elementary school classrooms. The AFT’s action points also included a screen ban for students in pre-kindergarten through second grade, as well as a prohibition on companion chatbots for students under 16, which schools have adopted at an alarming rate.
“If we don’t find a way to call this out from an education perspective, I fear that we will lose a generation of kids,” Weingarten told the New York Times in an interview. “The work of teaching and learning in the earliest grades should be done without AI.”
Gov. Hochul Says She’s Open to Limiting Screen Time for Younger Students in NY Schools
Gov. Kathy Hochul said Monday she’s open to the possibility of imposing limits on screen time in schools, citing the success of the smartphone ban and growing calls to curb technology in classrooms. Hochul said she’s heard from parents and educators who are especially concerned about early elementary school children using devices like individual laptops and iPads.
“I’m learning a lot, as a parent and grandparent, and some of the early schools are saying, ‘Not for the younger ones, keep the kids off,’” she said at an event celebrating the first year of the smartphone ban at a middle school in Brooklyn. “My gut tells me that’s the way to go,” she added. “We don’t have an answer right now, but it’s definitely worth looking [for an] answer.”
She said she’d approach screen limits the way she handled the smartphone ban, by taking time to speak with experts, educators and other stakeholders first, “gathering information … and coming up with a really solid policy.” Hochul’s comments come as momentum grows against screens in schools.
