Two Midway Elementary teachers in the Mead School District are celebrating receiving grants from the Safeway/Albertsons Foundation to fund hands-on learning experiences that they hope will excite and engage their students.

She’s no longer the national teacher of the year, but Mandy Manning of Spokane is still attempting to make a difference on a national scale. Usually, she’s been successful. Not so on Wednesday morning in McAllen, Texas, where she and other educators were denied entrance to the nation’s largest immigrant detention center.

When classes start at Logan Elementary later this month, teachers and staff will have just completed new training designed to teach them how to support students affected by adverse childhood experiences thanks to a $35,000 grant from the Hagan Foundation.

Ken Russell, superintendent of the Riverside School District north of Spokane, recently earned a Robert J. Handy Most Effective Administrator Award from the Washington Association of School Administrators.

The West Valley School District has turned a 2004 International school bus that would have otherwise been scrapped, or sold, into an incident response vehicle wired for the internet that can be used as a mobile command post during emergencies.

Spokane Public Schools officials said Tuesday that they are nearing an “interim solution” to fill its open director of safety, risk management and transportation position. The position opened when Santos Picacio resigned after he was confronted with allegations made last year in court records that he abused his wife and suffers from long-term mental health and substance abuse issues.

Capping a summer of conversation and revision, the Spokane Public Schools board of directors is poised to adopt a $461 million balanced budget for the upcoming school year.

The district will continue its scratch-cooking program and will be offering smoothies to students at middle and high schools in the next school year. Though staff reductions hit lunchrooms hard, the district will continue to offer nourishment in the mornings and nutitious options when the lunch bell rings, said Doug Wordell, director of Nutrition Services for Spokane Public Schools.

Some public libraries are dealing with so many patrons struggling with poverty, drug addiction or mental illness that a growing number have put social workers on staff. Other libraries have been training their staff to step in when a patron is suicidal or to administer an antidote to those who overdose on opioids. That’s caused debate among librarians about whether their changing role requires them to do work that goes uncomfortably far beyond their skill set.

Eighty children gathered at the Fred Meyer store on Thor Street on Saturday to go school clothes shopping with their Big Brother or Big Sister.

Already penciled in on Tuesday, the general election field for the Spokane Public Schools board was etched in stone Wednesday night after additional votes were tabulated.

Shawn Woodward has been on the job for only four weeks, but Mead’s new collaborator-in-chief is off to a fast start.

The district’s board of directors has authorized up to an additional $3.6 million for next year’s budget. That could mean a combo of options, including reducing class sizes, eliminating so-called “combination classrooms” that unite two grade levels and bringing back more custodians to improve cleanliness at the district’s buildings.

The coffee roaster and world-traveler famously offered to clear the lunch debt of impoverished students in northeastern Philadelphia this summer, only to earn an initial rebuke from school board members there. Carmichael said his inspiration to erase the debt came from his own childhood in Spokane.

First-grade teacher Analisa McCann was surprised to see an email in her inbox this spring congratulating her on being nominated for the ESD 101 Regional Teacher of the Year contest.

Kyle Rydell is settling into his office and getting to know the West Valley School District staff, but the new assistant superintendent isn’t really a stranger to the district.