“I taught him most everything up until kindergarten,” Lee said. “And then he surpassed me.” 

Managing Xavier’s outsized ability proved challenging. His mother, a teacher and performer, was constantly chasing down new opportunities for him in what felt like a job of its own, one that came with numerous out-of-pocket expenses. 

Lee paid a math tutor $70 a week to work with him for just 45 minutes and was constantly buying books and other materials to support him. One coding program alone cost $900. It was terrific, she said, but unaffordable in the long term. 

It wasn’t until summer 2023 that she learned about a brand new nonprofit created to support high-achieving young math students with more than $100,000 in educational assistance over 10 years. Xavier was recommended to by an he attended in Ohio. 

Soon, he and his mom were bombarded with help. 

“Now I have a partner,” Lee said of the organization. “They are begging us to tell them what he is interested in so that they can follow up. They make things so much easier.”

Born in June 2023 and funded by more than $16 million in grants from foundations focused on mathematics and supporting underserved youth, National Math Stars already paid for her son’s $299 3D printer and sundry items through , a math tutoring service that offers online classes, books and other learning tools.  

The program began with 12 children from around the country and added another 61 from Texas last fall. All were between the ages of 7 and 11. 

It will soon expand to the Midwest: It plans to bring on another 100 students later this year — half from the Lone Star State and the remainder from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. It intends to grow incoming classes to 200-plus children, as long as funding allows for the duration of their decade-long commitment.  

It finds participants by asking select schools — it’s in communication with more than 1,500 of them — to identify students in the second and third grade who score in the top 2% or 3% of their class on standardized math exams. Parents can also apply on their child’s behalf: and will close June 15.

Ilana Walder-Biesanz, National Math Stars’ founder, wants to identify and help mathematically gifted students when they are young, before factors like race and socioeconomics wear away at their opportunity and achievement. 

“If we look for top performers in second grade, we’re going to have a more diverse and representative group 
 than if we first look for them in eighth grade or in high school, when there has been more time for the people with more resources to get ahead — and the people with fewer resources to fall behind,” she said. 

Walder-Biesanz knows what it’s like to be unchallenged at school. She skipped three grades — she entered college at 15 and graduated four years later — but was another three years ahead in what was her favorite subject: She took algebra in sixth grade at age 9 and calculus in 10th grade when she was 12. 

She earned her bachelor’s from Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, her master’s in European Literature at the University of Cambridge and her MBA from Stanford. Walder-Biesanz previously worked as a product manager at Microsoft and Yahoo and later as a management consultant at Bain.

While her family was well resourced, her local schools’ math curriculum wasn’t challenging enough: She had to seek outside sources to supplement what it lacked. 

She knows not all children have that chance, which is why she is focused on widening opportunity for all mathematically gifted kids. 

While future classes will skew younger, the pilot included older students like Xavier to amass a group quickly and to serve as a vanguard: These children will reach middle, high school and college ahead of their peers, allowing National Math Stars time to further refine its offerings. 

Xavier, 11 and who enjoys coding, said he loves math because, “It can describe almost anything if you use it right.” 

The sixth grader said he’s currently trying to build a , an for generating a sequence of numbers whose properties approximate ones. They’re often used in programming, simulations and electronic games. 

He’s also interested in pentomino tilings — think of the shapes used in the game Tetris, which have four squares and add a fifth. 

“I just think it’s cool,” he said. 

And, through National Math Stars, he was able to talk to the creators of , which offers a free suite of math tools — including what Xavier calls a “super awesome” graphing calculator — to help users represent their ideas mathematically.

After being asked to speak to National Math Stars students at large, Desmos recognized some of them were already quite familiar with its offerings. Those students were invited to meet with the company’s product team and give their advice on what it could improve upon. 

Xavier said he was elated to speak to people so well respected by the mathematics community. 

Another participant, Haripriya Patel, 9 and in the third grade, attends school online. Her mother said she breezes through her core curriculum, electives and homework in just three to four hours each day.

A part of National Math Stars for about five months, she particularly enjoyed the welcome weekend in Houston, where she and other students made mathematical origami and completed logic puzzles and math-based games. 

Haripriya, who aspires to be a marine biologist, said she loves algebraic equations, geometry and number theory. 

“I like problem solving,” said Haripriya, who lives in Katy, Texas. “I enjoy the process, the opportunity.”

Johan Banegas, 8 and from Dallas, was thrilled to be accepted to the program because “not a lot of people can do it.” 

He said school doesn’t always provide the rigor he needs and that he’s already skipped second grade. 

“To be honest,” he said bashfully during a recent interview, “it’s still so easy in fourth grade.”

National Math Stars has paid for, among other items, Johan’s premium subscription to , which mails him technology packs meant for teens and adults.

Walder-Biesanz recognizes that participating families are asked to make a major commitment to the program. Their children must be enrolled in advanced math courses outside of school, regularly check in with their adviser, attend weekly math mentoring sessions and STEM-related summer programs each year.

“Obviously, we fully fund that, including travel and all the associated costs, but they do have to make the time for it and make it a priority,” she said. 

Johan, who wants to be an engineer, said he is determined to stick with it through high school. 

“They pay for a lot of stuff and they also let us learn more than usual so we can keep on being advanced in math,” he said.

Walder-Biesanz said her organization learned much from its pilot year, including how children value in-person interaction, how participating students didn’t need tutoring in advanced math — they were gifted enough to handle it on their own — and how families from lower socio-economic levels were more hesitant to ask for money to support their students’ academic ambitions. 

“We initially had a kind of free-form funding approach where we said, ‘Hey, you know, if it’s STEM related and you ask for it, we’ll probably say yes,” to telling families they had a certain budget and that “we want you to use the whole thing.”

Walder-Biesanz said her organization asks early on in the admissions process about family income and first-generation immigrant status, looking for indicators that the opportunity might be particularly valuable. 

“We take that strongly into consideration as we try to put student’s scores into context,” she said. “I’m more impressed with an ESL student from a low-income family who scores 99th percentile on our admissions exam than with a super well-resourced student who scores 99.9th percentile.”

Melodie Baker, executive director of , a nonprofit that uses research data and storytelling to shape and advance policies, said timely, early identification is crucial for cultivating and developing mathematical talent.

“Continuous support during formative years, especially for students who face economic stressors, can mitigate typical distractions — needing to work to help support family — and allow students to remain engaged,” she said. “Like the saying goes, while talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not.”

Walder-Biesanz said not all highly gifted children are well served by their local public schools and that it’s tragic to lose out on their abilities.

“As a country and as a world, we face a lot of big challenges,” she said. “We are going to need people with really strong STEM skills, really strong analytical ability, really strong problem solving and collaboration skills to tackle the world’s problems and to stay competitive as a country.”

In 2000, the Gannett media company purchased the local newspaper in Muncie, Indiana, The Star Press. Much of what happened next will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the long, accelerating decline of independent local news sources.

As this magazine’s editor in chief, Paul Glastris, has , first the chains began economizing on independent local coverage. Then the chains themselves succumbed to takeovers by even more ruthlessly profit-minded “vulture capital” firms, of which the most notorious are Alden and GateHouse Media. Three years ago, GateHouse took over the Gannett chain (and rebranded itself with Gannett’s name). This has left The Star Press and countless other once-independent and -profitable local papers with smaller newsrooms, shrinking audiences, and fewer possibilities to do the kind of detailed coverage that connects citizens with the progress and challenges of their towns.

That’s the familiar part of the story. Here is the surprise: the way another local institution rose to fill part of the civic information gap. That institution is The Ball State Daily News, the student newspaper at Ball State University in Muncie. Its performance in the past four years, in response to a historic change in the city’s public schools, is an important illustration of how colleges can innovate to address community challenges.

The background to the story is a decades-long cycle of decline in the city’s public school system, Muncie Community Schools (MCS). Enrollments shrank, performance fell, and budgetary pressures rose until, in 2018, the state of Indiana officially placed the Muncie school system under state receivership (along with schools in Gary). Soon afterward, the new president of Ball State, Geoffrey Mearns, surprised the legislature with a proposal that the university assume operating responsibility for the city’s schools. (See James Fallows, ““).

This was a revolutionary step in U.S. educational history. We’ve found no previous case of a publicly run university managing a whole city’s K–12 schools. (The closest counterpart was in the 1980s, when Boston University, a private institution, assumed control of the Chelsea schools, near Boston.) But the legislature agreed; a new school board with new powers took office, and MCS began the slow process of recovery. 

But how would community members be kept informed on what was working and what wasn’t? The normal news outlets had strained to keep up with routine events. This is where The Ball State Daily News came in.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of The Ball State Daily News. In March 1922, the paper debuted as The Easterner, named for the Indiana State Normal School, Eastern Division, the institution that eventually became Ball State University. 

The front page of the very first edition, now viewable in digital archives, is formally laid out like today’s New York Times. It announced itself as “A Live Paper From a Live School,” the “adequate expression of the school life and spirit.” The college was then four years old, and its spirit was growing. The first day’s stories include growing enrollments, a geology class trip to the Pacific coast, the baseball schedule, an announcement of the Spanish Club banquet, and the addition of a trial faculty position for a “physical director” for women—name and gender unmentioned. 

Today, the Daily News publishes a daily digital edition, a Thursday print edition, and special editions throughout the year. It is housed within a big media footprint at BSU, the eight-year-old Unified Media Lab, a hub designed to encourage multimedia collaborations among the paper, two magazines, a media metrics training center, a weather broadcast station, a TV newscast, a sports media and production center, and WCRD radio. 

The paper maintains a professional culture. The director of the Unified Media Lab, Lisa Renze-Rhodes, identifies her role at the editorially independent Daily News as an adviser who is available to help students “make the best decisions they can.” But “at the end of the day, they have authority to move forward or not,” she told me. “We need seasoned reporters, who understand quality and repercussions.” The paper is financed through university support, advertising revenue, and donor dollars.

As the turnover of the Muncie schools was beginning, the Daily News leadership and Renze-Rhodes met and agreed that this was a chance to move beyond the paper’s traditional legacy of standard nuts-and-bolts reporting about the city.

The students thought hard about telling deeper stories about the community, and about the schools. They were aware that Muncie residents were used to hearing bad reports about the local schools—the collapsed budget, the dropping enrollment, the poor graduation rates. The student journalists felt they could serve the community better by going inside the classrooms to see what was happening and telling the stories of the people working to make change. Journalism exists to cover the exceptional—an emergency, a surprising event. But much of its value lies in covering the routine—what happens day to day in classrooms and communities, what is working and what is not. A student newspaper cannot pretend to be a major investigative journalism institution. But the Daily News has given Muncie’s citizens a more nuanced picture of their schools than they would otherwise have.

Brooke Kemp was the editor in chief of the Daily News when the partnership between the university and the schools was under way. In a “Letter From the Editor” in April 2019, she wrote, “We hope to provide a full picture of the commitment to progress within the district. While we know MCS faces obstacles, we want readers to see what is being done.” Kemp told me in a conversation this summer that it had been exciting to lead the paper at this historic moment: “A reporter’s dream—being young and being able to cover this felt like a big deal.” 

Taylor Smith, this year’s outgoing Daily News editor in chief and a first-year reporter in 2018–19, echoes Kemp’s sentiment. Smith says the students were motivated to tell the stories that no one else was telling and were delighted to work like “real journalists.” One of her favorites is on a history teacher telling his students about Muncie itself, and “what it means for us to be Middletown and having inspired Americans that way.” (Nearly a century ago, Muncie was the setting for Middletown, a famed book of sociology.) 

Covering the story of the university-MCS partnership was a win for student journalists. Renze-Rhodes said this chance helped the students improve their craft, and “now more than ever, there is a need for strong, smart journalism.” 

Over the past four years, the Daily News has published several dozen articles about different aspects of the collaboration between Ball State and MCS. The series is dubbed The Partnership Project and branded “One district. One university. One shared future.”

In April 2021, Natasha Leland reported from inside a first-grade Spanish-English bilingual classroom at West View Elementary. She talked with students, teachers, parents, and BSU faculty whose university students were helping at the school as part of their Spanish studies. She wrote about the history, goals, and everyday challenges of the dual-language program, and the context of bilingualism in the U.S. 

In May 2021, Dorian Ducre wrote about Indiana’s new bill, inspired by the 2020 national election, requiring middle school students to take a one-semester civics course. The article included commentary from a state legislator, a Muncie middle school principal, and BSU political science professors about the various implications of the new requirement.

Having student reporters dig into stories was a new experience for the town as well as the young reporters. “Creating the relationships, building the trust, took time,” said Kemp, describing the initial reticence among those in the schools who had grown wary of negative stories. The staff was intent on building a solid foundation to pass along, aware that the reporters’ longest tenure would be a short four years. 

Kemp told me that once they started writing, the situation “became real.” It was a big step, she said, “accepting the fact that we are a local paper and a local source of news.” Kemp grew up in Muncie, but through the Daily News reporting, she saw a new side of her hometown. “These are people who are moving our community forward,” she said. “I never knew about it before. I was being a better citizen, too.”

For the city of Muncie itself, this kind of local reporting has a number of advantages: helping it see its own story unfold, letting townspeople speak for themselves, imparting to students a rich sense of where they live, and building shared knowledge of a community and its values. 

Lee Ann Kwiatkowski is CEO and director of public education of Muncie Community Schools. Like Taylor Smith, she told me the students cover stories not done by the mainstream press in Muncie. “They do a nice job tailoring stories and going deeper,” she said. “Word about the schools is getting around. More people learn about work we’re doing because of the university paper.” Andy Klotz, MCS’s chief communications officer, told me that while it is difficult to quantify the impact of the stories on enrollment, graduation rates, and so forth with hard numbers, there is a clear soft measure. “A big factor [is] turning the tide on old perceptions of an old system that existed before the partnership,” he said.

Smith described to me the creative audience development strategy that her team carried out, building readership through savvy social media that connects with students via Instagram, alumni via Facebook, and colleagues via Twitter. The students also applied an old-fashioned shoe-leather approach to building awareness, providing copies to local businesses and showing up at community events in Muncie to distribute papers when stories relevant to the event-goers appeared. When Muncie’s branch of Habitat for Humanity held a fund-raiser, copies of the Daily News were available for the roughly 300 attendees to take home.

On June 23, 2022, nearly four years into its new reporting style, the Daily News ran a sports story that jumped off the virtual page in contrast to the 1922 announcement of a trial position for a “physical director” for women. The headline is “50 Years of Title IX.” Just as women’s sports have moved from the sidelines to the big arenas, so has the Daily News moved from being a college newspaper to must-read local journalism.

This originally appeared at the  and is published here in partnership with the .

The national debate about issues in schools has come to the Midwest. In the wake of the passage of Florida’s so-called “” law, more than a dozen other states – including Missouri, , Tennessee and Ohio – have aimed at limiting how teachers discuss topics of gender identity or sexual orientation.

Based on my own experience, that of my collaborator Steven Gill, and our initial research, teachers in the Midwest are having experiences similar to those .

We have both faced invalidating, even scary, obstacles in our journeys as out queer educators, and we have seen our queer and trans students suffer as well.

Our stories

For me, being a faculty sponsor for the school’s gay-straight alliance student group was both heartwarming and heartbreaking. I started my career at an urban school serving a high-poverty population in Nebraska in 2001 and found that the school’s GSA membership was just a handful of students.

During my first year as a volunteer sponsor of the group, another teacher was invited by the official sponsor to one of our meetings and showed a video of people claiming to be “former gays.” He then pulled out a Bible and had a discussion with the students about how who they were was a sin. The official sponsor, a school counselor, smiled throughout and let him continue speaking.

I fought back tears of anger as I heard students say, “I know I’m going to hell, but I can’t control how I feel and I’ve tried not to be gay, but it’s impossible.” I was furious that this was allowed to happen in what was supposed to be a safe and affirming space in a public school where this type of proselytizing should not be allowed. I watched as all the confidence and self-esteem drained from the students.

When I became the official sponsor, I ensured that teacher would not be allowed back to speak to the group. Later, he told a lesbian teacher he was praying for her soul. Twenty-one years later, he is still at that school – in a leadership role.

By the time I left in 2011, students were out and proud as allies and as a part of the LGBTQ community. While I won for my work there, neither was acknowledged by my school.

I witnessed students being disowned when they came out while also being rejected by religious shelters. There were many suicide attempts and countless mental health crises, and grades would drop as a result of bullying and harassment by teens and adults.

I have always been out as a queer woman, and many students thanked me for that. But I was told that two other teachers called me a “dyke” in the staff lounge because I participated in the to support LGBTQ rights. Some students told me they were praying for my soul around the flagpole. A parent accused me of turning his child gay because they went home with a rainbow ribbon and he threatened to follow me home and show me “what a real man is.” The school had two visits by the infamously homophobic . Its members held signs across the street saying “God hates fags” and tried to distribute literature to our students as they left the school building.

My collaborator Steve Gill reports, “I’m a current middle and high school social studies teacher who is out as nonbinary, and queer, to my students, and my school system. When I was going through elementary, middle, and high school and college I had no out queer or nonbinary or transgender teachers, or any type of representation.

“This caused me feelings of isolation and loneliness, as I did not have close queer icons or representations to look up to.

“In adulthood, as a teacher, I firmly and confidently tell students ‘I am Coach Gill, I go by “Coach” because I am nonbinary. I am also Black and Queer.’ I choose to be out despite the discrimination I have faced, continue to face, and will face in the future. I choose to be out because .

“I want the people in my community to know that LGBTQ people exist in everyday jobs, not just as famous celebrities. I have students who come out to me because I am a safe space. I know of students who have been kicked out of their homes, misgendered, and they are mocked and ridiculed for being out at home.”

Our survey and what the preliminary results found

Our research shows that we are not alone. Many schools in the Midwest are places where queer and trans educators cannot thrive and do their jobs without fear or hesitation.

We posted a preliminary survey on social media, seeking teachers in the Midwestern states of Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota. Out of the 45 educators who responded, 12 place their identities in the broad spectrum of LGBTQ community. But just four of them are out in their schools.

While our initial survey data is limited to these 45 respondents, the results are not surprising given our lived experiences and .

But our experiences and those of our survey participants are being lost as lawmakers restrict what , and . We plan to conduct more research to better understand how schools can participate in making the future more fair and just for everyone.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the