Kate Grumke
Senior Environmental Reporter, STLPRI report on agriculture and rural issues for Harvest Public Media and am the Senior Environmental Reporter at St. Louis Public Radio, my hometown NPR station.
I started at STLPR as an education reporter, covering late night school board meetings and tagging along on field trips. Before moving back to Missouri, I spent more than five years producing award-winning television in Washington, D.C., most recently at the PBS NewsHour. In that work I climbed to the top of a wind turbine in Iowa, helped plan the environmental section of a presidential debate and produced multiple news-documentaries on energy and the environment.
I graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and hold a certificate in data journalism from Columbia University’s Lede Program.
You can reach me at kgrumke@stlpr.org or follow me on social media @kgrumke.
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Most elementary teacher preparation programs across the country and in Missouri do not adequately focus on the science of reading, according to a new review from the National Council on Teacher Quality. In fact, Missouri's programs were among the worst in the nation — with the exception of UMKC.
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The school districts want to use a new state law to get out of the Missouri standardized testing and accountability system. Several Kansas City-area districts have asked for an exemption from the Missouri Assessment Program, including Lee's Summit, Liberty and Raymore-Peculiar.
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New research found the pandemic led to drops in the percent of kids who were receiving early intervention and early childhood special education, both nationally and in Missouri.
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The state funding is divided into two pots; more than $55 million is set aside for school districts and charter schools, while about $26 million is available for community-based child care providers. The programs are supposed to prioritize low-income families.
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When an old chiller stopped working in 2016, the Parkway School district Decided to install a geothermal system that uses the Earth’s temperature to heat and cool the school. It also recently added solar panels to the building. Altogether, the district says Parkway South is saving more than $100,000 a year in energy costs.
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Three openly transgender educators in Kirkwood, Missouri, say the school district "sexualized my identity" and forced them to leave their jobs. In the backdrop are proposed Missouri policies that seek to limit how trans children and adults can exist openly in the state, including in schools.
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The Missouri legislative session is more than halfway done, and many different bills affecting schools are making their way through the capitol.
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Nurses in schools across Missouri say their students struggle to afford period products and have missed school because of periods. Now Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has $1 million to reimburse schools for menstrual hygiene products.
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This is the first time Missouri schools are being rated under a new accountability system. Kansas City Public Schools — which just regained full accreditation last year — sits just above the range for provisional accreditation, while Hickman Mills would remain provisional. However, the state won't use these results to change accreditation status until the 2023-2024 school year.
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A new Missouri law made it a crime to provide minors with sexually explicit visual material, leading librarians across the state to remove anything from their collections that they thought could be considered criminal.