education

It's a familiar feeling.

Tucson Magnet School senior Tessa Kozlowski, 17, was named 2008 Boys & Girls Club State Youth of the Year at a breakfast Tuesday.

Southwest Valley fifth-graders preparing for a nature walk were briefly distracted when a special discovery was made.

What is to be done with children who simply have no interest in reading?

Mesa school kids can rejoice. Starting with the school year that begins in August 2009, they will get a full week off in October instead of the two-day break they have received the last several years.

Lela Alston/Isaac School/district

"Oh snap!" a student breathes, startled as the image on the monitor switches from a PowerPoint presentation of multicolored grids to a brain surgery in progress.

Buried on page 38 of the Dec. 9 Arizona Republic was a tiny article, "Fewer and Fewer in U.S. Read for Fun." But it reported a major, national, long-range study by the National Endowment for the Arts, which revealed that interest in reading is in steep decline, paralleling a decline in reading ability starting in the middle school years. This was not news to me, having been a reading teacher and reading specialist for many years. But it should have been page one news, and it should have been required reading for educators.

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Arizona children overwhelmingly voted for Barack Obama for president.