News: Education | Christina Cooke

Ooltewah Middle sixth-grader Price McGinnis feels differently about girls than he did last year. When he gets around girls at school, he said, he feels a weird combination of nervousness and happiness.
“When you’re talking to girls, you’re pretty much flirting,” said Price, 12, who has a girlfriend he sees at church on Wednesdays and Sundays. “It was like that a little bit in fifth grade, but it really hit in sixth grade.”

On the floor of her dimly lit living room, Acquanitta Keith thumbed through a gray plastic box containing school registration papers, report cards and award certificates of her two school-age children. Her oldest daughter, Anamesha Hollins, now a fifth-grader at East Lake Elementary, has attended seven schools since kindergarten: four in Chattanooga, three in Knoxville.

Iesha Jones planned to spend her 14th birthday last February shopping for clothes, getting her nails done and hanging out with her boyfriend. Instead, the Orchard Knob Middle eighth-grader spent the day in labor at Erlanger hospital and used her birthday money to buy clothes and diapers for her baby boy. “He messed up my whole birthday plan,” she said in June. “I wanted to go shopping, and I ended up having him.”

Still, she’s happy to share a birthday with her son, who is 7 months old.

Kathy Berger gave up on her high school education during her senior year at Tyner High after her English teacher threw 16 of her book reports in the trash because they were late. The year was 1940, and Ms. Berger had been so busy planting sweet potatoes and corn on the family farm that she hadn’t been able to complete her assignments on time.