1. We start today with a quick thanks to the folks at Gongwer, who briefly noted the release of Fordham’s new report on interdistrict open enrollment. Much appreciated! (Gongwer Ohio, 1/19/21)
    
2. We have discussed in these clips before the topic of Ohio’s new readiness seals. What they are, who they are for, and how districts are choosing to define them. The version of this story in Dayton City Schools, unfortunately, includes a game of two truths and a lie. What’s worse is that all three are depressing. The lie (if I do say so myself): Ohio’s graduation requirements are “complicated”. Seriously? You explained them in less than 60 words! Far less than it took to explain how a performing arts seal works. Truth one: the district said it “likely wouldn’t be overly stringent” on approving activity completions for those seals. I mean, why would you? Truth two is a direct quote from the story (no idea whose analysis it is): “Given the breadth of options, the seals likely won’t be the main hurdle to a diploma in the new system, compared to the four years of credits or the competency area.” Amen. (Dayton Daily News, 1/17/21) But never mind that. We’ve got more important stuff to talk about in Dayton. ODE’s annual review of Dayton City Schools’ special education services—the result of site visits conducted in early 2020, pre-pandemic—was presented to the elected school board this week. It’s a doozy…and not in a good way. District Superintendent Elizabeth Lolli has some comments and explanations. (Dayton Daily News, 1/19/21) At that same meeting, Superintendent Lolli got a two-year contract extension and a raise via unanimous vote of the elected school board. (Dayton Daily News, 1/19/21)
   
   

3. Governor DeWine announced yesterday that 96 percent of school districts across the state have signed his pledge to return to at least a hybrid in-person model of learning by March 1. Let the vaccines flow! (Cleveland.com, 1/19/21) I have to remind myself that Cleveland Metropolitan School District is one of those that has been remote-learning-only since March. Why’s that weird for me? Because the “learning pod” described here looks so much like regular in-person school (the only things missing were flesh-and-blood, degreed, union teachers) that I suspected a misunderstanding on my part. But nope: This pod is doing all the work of “school”—and then some—for its fully ELL population. Same with several others described herein. And it seems to be going really well by all indications. Are y’all sure you want to mess with this? Especially if it means going back to the old way of doing business? (Freshwater Cleveland, 1/19/21)

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Last week, NY1 reported that the New York City Department of Education will end its elementary-level gifted and talented test after administering it in person this April. Given to four-year-olds across the city, it determines whether a student will be admitted into New York’s special programs for high achievers—programs whose future, after this move, is unclear. “We will spend the next year engaging communities around what kind of programming they would like to see that is more inclusive, enriching, and truly supports the needs of academically advanced and diversely talented students at a more appropriate age,” NYC Department of Education spokeswoman Miranda Barbot told NY1.

That sounds reasonable, of course. Screening children at such a young age, for one, is unusual and debated even among gifted advocates. And these decisions are well-meaning insofar as they’re guided by a desire to make New York schools better for Black, Hispanic, and low-income children, whose academic outcomes are far worse than those of their more advantaged peers.

The danger is that leaders, after scrapping the gifted entrance exams, scrap gifted education altogether. This is a real possibility. As NY1 reports, “In 2019, a task force assembled by the mayor to help increase diversity in schools recommended that the city no longer track students deem gifted and talented into separate classes from their peers.” Doing this would, sadly, harm the very children these decisions purport to benefit. They don’t need fewer gifted and talented programs. They need more.

This is also part of a larger trend in American K–12 education. As I wrote in October, a growing number of school systems are making the misguided decision to dismantle gifted program in the name of equality, insisting that the anti-racist thing to do is eliminate them. Little did I know then that New York City, home of the largest school district in the country, would start down this fraught path three months later, becoming perhaps the prime example of this worrisome direction.

But as I also wrote then, and reemphasize now, this is exactly the wrong approach. Rather than repeat myself in explaining why that’s so—why gifted education done right benefits Black and Hispanic children, and is emphatically not inherently racist—I believe it’s best to simply republish that October piece in full here.

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As our country grapples with racial injustice, there are persistent calls to diversify elite institutions at all levels, from corporate and foundation boards to law schools and medical schools to undergraduate programs. All good. And in line with the adage that college begins in kindergarten, many of these efforts eventually look at schools to better prepare more Black, Hispanic, and low-income children to excel academically and earn a shot at entering selective universities. To do that, we need to make sure that the most promising among them get enrichment and acceleration. That means gifted education.

Yet tragically, instead of following that logic and expanding gifted services for Black, Brown, and other historically disadvantaged students, some insist that the anti-racist thing to do is eliminate them. This has led to misguided questions like “Is it even possible to make a concept that has racist origins more equitable?” in an essay published by the Hechinger Report, and moves that seek to replace gifted ed with toothless initiatives like “schoolwide enrichment.” This is exactly the wrong approach.

To be sure, gifted education has a diversity problem, due in part to how school systems have historically designed these programs and other enrichment efforts. A Fordham study in 2018 called Is There A Gifted Gap? found that White students constitute 47.9 percent of the student population but 55.2 percent of those enrolled in gifted programs, while the comparable figures for Black students are 15.0 and 10.0 percent, and for Hispanic students, 27.6 and 20.8 percent. Those latter student groups are also 49 and 23 percent less likely, respectively, to participate in Advanced Placement than their peers. And when Black and Brown students attend a school that offers International Baccalaureate courses, they are 62 percent and 51 percent less likely, respectively, to take part.

But the problem isn’t the idea of gifted education itself—which, far from being inherently racist, is simply the practice of grouping higher-achieving and higher-potential students together so that they can benefit from deeper and faster curricula that wouldn’t work well in regular classrooms, especially classrooms with lots of students struggling to reach grade level.

The real problem has three components. First, our country, communities, and schools have long done a poor job of maximizing the potential of students in low-income neighborhoods that are predominantly Black and Hispanic—regardless of their ability. Not only do they suffer from poverty, they have less access to healthcare, healthy food, safe streets, early childhood education, and much more. And then when they do attend school, it’s too often in crumbling buildings that lack adequate supplies, where they sit in crowded and unruly classrooms with less experienced teachers who are more likely to transfer or quit. The list of disadvantages goes on. But the takeaway is simple: We make it far too difficult for these children to succeed.

Second, too many districts serving poor students and students of color have taken previous and misguided charges of racism to heart and eliminated their own gifted education programs, opting instead for the lure of “heterogeneous classrooms.” This jargon is based on the egalitarian but mistaken notion that letting some kids go faster than others, even go at their own speed, is inherently suspect. But here’s the thing: Proponents of this fallacious view have long been more effective at shaming urban districts in deep-blue cities to eliminate gifted education than they have been with their affluent and suburban counterparts. So rich kids with lots of academic potential still get access to enrichment and acceleration—in their fancy suburban public schools, expensive private schools, or at home—whereas poor and minority kids in the city do not.

Third, even when school systems do offer gifted programs, they are often too small and limited to serve all students who might benefit from them, especially Black, Hispanic, and low-income children. Often such programs are concentrated in neighborhoods full of demanding upper-middle class parents. In many places, moreover, admissions are based on standardized test scores, for which administrators set objective cutoffs—ironically, in the name of equity. These tests are rarely universal, meaning families have to ask even to take them, or must rely on teachers to nominate their children as candidates. This ends up favoring affluent and advantaged children, who tend to score higher on standardized tests because of those advantages—not because they’re more able or have more potential. Higher-income students are also more likely to have engaged, pushy parents, who are more likely to know about the tests, make sure their kids take them, do everything they can to motivate educators to pick their children when that’s required, and sometimes engage private tutors to give their kids an academic boost.

These problems—systemic, and in some cases systematically racist, to be sure—have nothing to do with the basic idea of gifted education. The idea remains sound and stands to benefit the Black, Brown, and low-income children who need it most. We just have to expand access, while ensuring that these programs continue to challenge all of their students and maximize their potential.

To achieve this, districts should adopt systems that better develop the natural ability of all high achievers, and then more equitably identify them for gifted services. First, they should “frontload,” meaning they ought to raise schools’ academic rigor in early grades so that disadvantaged pupils are ready for more advanced offerings later. Then they should universally test all students beginning in third grade for gifted program eligibility, when the excellence gap has hopefully narrowed because of the frontloading in pre-K and K–2. The top 5 percent or so of test takers in each school, not the top 5 percent in the district, should be identified for gifted ed. Joining them should be another 5 percent of pupils nominated by teachers on the basis of uncommon potential or simply a gleam in the eye.

This would diversify the population qualifying for these services and not just favor kids who are White, Asian, or upper-middle-class, as the system does today. And in giving high-ability and high-potential Black and Hispanic students so many more years of increased academic rigor and enrichment, it would better prepare them to gain acceptance to, and excel at, selective high schools and colleges, where they’d earn degrees that make them competitive for respected and lucrative careers. In other words, it achieves the ends of diversifying opportunities for Black, Brown, and low-income children, but does so by building up their achievement, instead of tearing down the unique and valuable services provided by high-quality gifted programs.

As calls increase to eliminate gifted programs in the name of equity, policymakers and school leaders must resist them—and recognize that bowing to that misguided pressure will do more harm, not less, to their Black and Brown students. Instead, they should double down on gifted education, diversifying and strengthening it so as to maximize its benefits for the disadvantaged boys and girls that need it most.

I’ll miss the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation now that it has closed its research and evaluation department, where I served as director from 2011 to 2020. After almost a decade examining challenges faced by high-ability students, I’ve learned a lot. I want to share with you ten of the key takeaways. It is important to acknowledge what we know and act immediately on that information.

1. Talented students are everywhere. High achievers look like America. They come from every community, race, gender, and socioeconomic background. Brilliance knows no boundaries, gender, or color. Cooke scholars have been found in all fifty states, in small rural towns, vast cities, and every place in between.

2. Yet excellence gaps abound. Facing unequal access to quality educational opportunities, some bright young people are less likely than others to reach advanced levels of academic performance. In 2019, for example, just 12 percent of White students but only 2 percent of Black students scored “Advanced” on the National Assessment of Education Progress. Three percent of those receiving meal subsidies scored “Advanced” versus 15 percent of others. These gaps appear early and continue through college. Worse still, they’re growing.

3. Identifying talented students takes work. Excellence gaps can be closed with well-crafted programming but many students lack access. Last year just 2 percent of students at elite, STEM-focused Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax County were Black, though Black students comprise 10 percent of county enrollments. In response, the school is changing its admissions processes, to create more equitable access.

Students from low-income households, rural areas, and minority populations are under-identified for gifted programming because they lack programming and methods used to identify “gifted” students often favor the fortunate. There is no silver bullet for identification but multiple measures work better than one. Universal screening in early grades helps, as does using local norms—i.e., taking the brightest kids from each school.

Teachers know their students better than anyone. Yet only nine states require them to be trained in identifying and serving high achievers. Sometimes all that’s needed is a little empowerment. Says Marcia Gentry of Purdue’s Gifted Education Resource Institute, “We just tell teachers we’re looking for more [low-income students] and they nominate at twice the level.”

4. Begin cultivating students’ interests early. It’s never too early to ignite kids’ passion for learning. Loudoun County’s Propel program immerses elementary students in high interest STEM projects. They solve problems, collaborate, and deepen their scientific knowledge. JKCF’s Young Scholars program fosters interest exploration starting in middle school. Once reaching college, Young Scholars are less apt than their peers to change majors because they arrived with deeper understanding of their interests.

5. Exposure, exposure, exposure. High achievers need opportunities and role models that match their ability levels and broaden their understanding of the world and career possibilities. James Madison University’s Valley Scholars program furnishes high-achieving rural students with intensive, year-long programming. This includes inviting scientists to visit, connecting students with high-achieving peers in other schools, and taking them to visit colleges. In this era of distance learning, much of this can be virtual.

6. Smart students need guidance, too. Being talented doesn’t erase the need for guidance. Whether it’s advice on which courses to take, encouragement to pursue extra opportunities, or help navigating college admissions and financial aid, high achievers benefit from astute counseling. Without it, tremendous discrepancies appear in outcomes for disadvantaged students. Organizations like Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America and Thrive Scholars provide counseling to talented students from low-income families and those whose parents never attended college. As a result, their students attend college at rates that equal or exceed wealthier students.

7. Engaging with like-minded peers is powerful. The Covid-19 pandemic has many costs, including the dearth of opportunities for students to interact in person. Historically, one of the most valued aspects of the Cooke scholarship has been its summer gatherings. There’s magic in bringing brilliant young people together. Instead of intellectual (and sometimes social) isolation, kids leave these summer events musing “I never knew other kids like me existed” and saying they have found their community. 

8. Students look up to older students. High achievers also benefit from connecting with those a bit older. In JMU’s Valley Scholars program, undergraduates advise high school students. The Mississippi Public School Consortium for Educational Access, which brings AP courses to rural students online, engages college students as virtual tutors. This “near-peer” mentoring offers students advice from a trusted source—older youth—and program staff find that this is the most valued connection for some young people.

How can programs build community virtually? Breakthrough Collaborative proved it could be done this summer, supporting over 4,500 students in virtual programming taught by near-peer teaching fellows.

9. Measuring proficiency is not enough. Many state accountability measures focus on proficiency. That’s important but doesn’t do justice to high achievers, many of whom start school each fall having already reached the standards for their grade. Their performance needs monitoring, too, best done by measuring students’ growth in each year. Yet only five states now report growth for high achievers. All should do so, with performance disaggregated by sub-group, to see whether they are cultivating their next generation’s leaders, innovators, and inventors from all sectors of their populations.

10. Closing excellence gaps matters—especially now. Today, as America contends with the pandemic, educators must think creatively about how to bring advanced learning opportunities virtually to students. As we work to continue educating all our students, let’s not forget our high achievers, especially those from underrepresented groups. Scholarship organizations like JKCF cannot do the whole job alone, not to the extent that the nation needs and our youth deserve. Schools must offer advanced learning opportunities or partner with others to do so. Teachers must be trained to identify and support high-ability students. Districts must monitor data on advanced performance. States should require identification and monitor programs for quality.

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Ensuring our underrepresented gifted students are appropriately challenged will both give them a fair shot at social mobility and help build intellectual capital for our nation as it rebuilds its economy and its spirit in the years to come.

Editor’s note: This post was first published by NAGC.

In March 2020, a group of researchers and economists led by Peter Q. Blair of Harvard University published a working paper exploring the idea that on-the-job skills acquisition could be just as valuable as a bachelor’s degree, or more, in helping workers move up the career ladder to higher-wage work. A full review of that earlier work can be found here, but the bottom line was that college was not the only route to upward mobility. “In-demand jobs might be filled from the ranks of skilled, hard-working lower-wage workers” as well as from the ranks of B.A. holders, Blair wrote.

The group Opportunity@Work, home of the economists on the original research team, has pursued this line of thought into a number of additional analyses. Its new report looks at the mechanisms for employment mobility—how workers successfully leverage their skills into higher-wage jobs and the barriers that can prevent their rise.

The new analysis uses data contained in the O*NET database, a comprehensive collection of occupational information, to compare the skills required for any two given jobs. The framework calculates a “distance” between those two jobs based on the amount of similarity in skills. The greater the overlap in skills, the shorter the distance between jobs.

Using data from the Current Population Survey, the analysis also identified over 130 million job transitions occurring between 2010 and 2019 to understand which workers change jobs, how successful those moves are, and the different ways in which those with skills[1] and those with degrees fare in their new jobs. Transitions are classified as upward, downward, or stagnant based on the impact on worker wages.

Downward and stagnant transitions predominate for workers without college degrees, or 61 percent of the transitions observed. The upward transitions this population do make are of a smaller skills distance than their degreed peers. That is, there is more of a skills match between the origin and the destination jobs. Workers with college degrees, meanwhile, make more upward transitions than their non-degreed peers. That’s not surprising. More striking, though, is the distance over which they transition, often rising between jobs with very different skill requirements. That is, the destination job requires more and different skills than the origin job. The lack of skills overlap between the jobs indicates that degreed workers likely don’t have all the needed skills of the destination job. While it could be that employers in the destination job assume that their new employees “have what it takes” to adapt, the researchers suggest more pessimistically that the lack of skills is literally “papered over” with the indicator of a college degree. Wage growth in upward transitions is also higher for degreed workers than for non-degreed ones.

In looking at the 31 million upward transitions non-degreed workers did make, specific mobility pathways recurred. Researchers identified fifty-one so-called “gateway” jobs that were reasonably accessible to lower-skilled workers, employed large numbers of people, and reliably led to additional upward transitions. Examples include customer service representatives, pipefitters, computer support specialists, licensed practical and vocational nurses, and advertising sales agents.

Unfortunately, even these few avenues of upward mobility were not accessible to enough workers. Those with college degrees still comprised the majority (59 percent) of those working in these specific gateway paths. Historic patterns of job discrimination were also front and center in upward transitions. Black and Hispanic workers started out in lower-wage jobs more often than their White counterparts and made shorter distance transitions, despite likely having the same skills. Women showed the same transition patterns as Black and Hispanic workers and also were less well-compensated than men even when they made transitions of an identical skills distance.

Ultimately, this work shows that there is far more potential for upward mobility in our present workforce than is being realized, and the folks from Opportunity@Work are convinced that reverence for the college degree among employers is a large part of the problem. The report’s recommendations are strongly targeted at employers, urging them to open and strengthen pathways of employment for skilled workers by investing in their existing non-degreed workforce and helping them move up. But who knows how the coronavirus pandemic will distort the world of work going forward? Perhaps higher education’s loss will be skilled workers’ gain.

SOURCE: “Navigating with the STARs,” Opportunity@Work (December 2020).

It might seem far away, but the 2021–22 school year is just around the corner. In a few short months, students will be gearing up for summer break—and using that time wisely has never been more important. This fall will be similarly significant. The vaccine rollout hasn’t been as smooth as most of us hoped, we’re still waiting for evidence that the vaccine is safe for kids, and experts warn that the pandemic is far from over. But it’s possible that schools could fully reopen for the coming year, and that means education leaders need to start planning now.

To be clear, none of this means that schools or leaders should stop focusing on this year. Kids are still in school (albeit virtually in a lot of places), and what happens between now and the end of the school year matters immensely. But what we do in the future matters too, and it’s important for leaders to start thinking about how to handle this summer and fall. Here’s a look at three areas where they should focus their attention.

Collecting reliable academic data

Although there is some data estimating learning loss, we don’t yet know precisely how big of an impact school closures and virtual learning have had on students. The collective consensus is that there’s been a disproportionate impact on children who were already underserved—low-income students, students of color, those with special needs, and English language learners—but nobody knows for sure.

That needs to change as soon as possible. As long as it’s safe to do so, it’s imperative that schools administer state assessments this spring. These assessments will allow us to reliably measure student achievement and growth across schools, subgroups, and geographic regions, and compare those results to previous years to identify potential gaps and losses. Local assessments matter, too, but it’s important to assess potential learning loss on a broad scale so that achievement gaps are clear. State leaders need to know where to send supplemental funding, district and school leaders need to know where to target intervention efforts, and education researchers need a new baseline from which to track progress moving forward. None of that is possible without reliable and comparable state assessment data. 

Adding more learning time

School closures and remote schooling have cost kids hundreds of hours of learning time. To make up for all these lost hours, the best thing schools can do is provide students with additional time. Summer school, extended days and years, and high-dosage tutoring after school and even on the weekends are all interventions that schools should consider. Ideally, school leaders will spend the current semester planning to implement all these options during the coming summer months and school year—and perhaps beyond—until students are caught up.

At the state level, it’s critical that policymakers provide districts the resources necessary to boost learning time. The federal funding headed to Ohio thanks to the most recent federal relief package should help with that.

Communicating to parents and the public

Even with good data and a solid plan for implementing time-based interventions, schools won’t succeed in catching kids up without clear and consistent communication efforts. Schools need to focus on communicating with two groups in particular.

First and most importantly are parents and families. Parents need to know where their kids are academically in comparison to state standards. They also need to know what schools plan to do to close achievement gaps and remediate learning loss, and how they can support those efforts at home. No time should be wasted in waiting for parents to come to schools for help either. Remediation action plans should be automatically provided with clear timelines and expectations along with minimal red tape.

Second, schools need to communicate with the broader community. Taxpayers and stakeholders also deserve to know where students are and how schools are addressing learning loss. But clear communication about what schools need from the surrounding community—volunteers for tutoring programs, equipment donations, Covid-safe learning spaces—is also vitally important.

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Even if schools are able to fully reopen this fall, the lingering impacts of the pandemic will be significant and long-lasting. The best way for leaders and teachers to minimize these impacts is to start planning how to address them now. That means getting clear data on where students are, organizing and offering as many time-based interventions as possible, and communicating both academic data and intervention offerings clearly to parents.

Charters and the incoming presidential administration

Education writers seem keen to look to the future these days. For example, Matt Barnum recently looked at the strong possibility—as he sees it—that more federal Covid support money could be coming to schools when the new Congress convenes. He speculates that charters might be at the end of the list for additional support, but describes why charter advocates might have reason for optimism.

Charters and philanthropy

A recent opinion piece from the Philanthropy Roundtable seemed to echo Barnum’s concerns regarding federal funding for charters, but found its own optimism in the simple and demonstrable fact of charter school quality. “Even though public charter schools don’t benefit from the amount of cash flowing into public schools,” the piece concluded, “they still manage not only to teach their students, but also, in many cases, to provide better educational and behavioral outcomes than their traditional public-school peers.” For these reasons, they urged philanthropists to reconsider charter schools as worthy of support going forward.

The view from the Hoosier State

Two years ago, Indianapolis Public Schools successfully passed a referendum which boosted their funding substantially. Despite the tight partnership between a group of Indy charter schools and the district, those charters were largely locked out of the windfall. That disparity, along with the long-standing funding gaps for charters across Indiana, has caught the attention of the state legislature. Chalkbeat speculates that momentum is growing for a boost in charter funding…as long as other state budget priorities don’t end up taking precedence.

Back here at home

Columbus City Schools announced this week its intention to shift to a hybrid learning model—with some caveats—on February 1. The state’s largest district has been operating a fully-remote learning model since March of 2020. There are still a lot of details to be worked out, not least of which is transportation, which has been used solely by students in charter and private schools for nearly a year. Sounds like a lot of negotiating is ahead.

1. I won’t call them silver linings—waaaaaay too soon for that (thanks to my cousin for schooling me on that, painful as that conversation might have been)—but it seems like certain adaptations to the pandemic could benefit students far beyond 2020. For example, a wide swath of rural Logan County will have better access to broadband internet service thanks to a state K-12 connectivity grant. The hub will located in Riverside Local School District. Nice! (WDTN-TV, Dayton, 1/13/21) Meanwhile, a grant from Philanthropy Ohio and the Ohio Department of Education will help two small school districts in Morgan County implement what sounds like a mastery model of education. A real one! My longtime Gadfly Bites subscribers (are there really 17 of you now?!) will know how much I loooooove a proper mastery model. (Morgan County Herald, 1/13/21) Staff members in pandemic learning pods (by all of their various names and in all of their copious non-school settings) could soon move to the front of the line for Covid vaccinations in Cuyahoga County due to the importance of their education work. (Cleveland.com, 1/13/21)
    
2. Very swiftly after announcing a return to sports practices, Columbus City Schools announced its plan to return to some semblance of an in-person schooling model starting February 1—with a number of exceptions and caveats. There is no word about arrangements for students whose parents might not want them to come back to school buildings, but since the hybrid model exempts a lot of kids, one assumes there will be options for those folks too. One group of students who might find their options more limited in the new plan: students exercising school choice. There’s quite a bit of discussion here about transportation planning and how it might cramp the style of affect charter and private school students who have had the district’s bus fleet all to themselves for the last 10 months. The gears are clanking into motion, both literally and figuratively. (Columbus Dispatch, 1/13/21) Perhaps folks in Columbus will be heartened by the assessment of Lorain City Schools’ CEO (You Can’t Call Me Superintendent) Jeff Graham, whose district is just completing its first week of a hybrid learning model after being fully remote since March 2020. Says the CEO: “It’s easy to pick up on the science of [teaching kids both in person and virtually at the same time] but the art of it takes a little bit of time.” Dude should know about the art of things, I figure. (The Chronicle, 1/15/21)
    
3. And speaking of districts (still, despite it all) operating under the aegis of an Academic Distress Commission, Youngstown City Schools will soon be launching its parent university to help “strengthen the bond” between district and family. Y’town’s version has its own name—which is so cutesy that it requires an explanation every time it appears—and list of…let’s call them “highly-recommended” activities parents should do. (Youngstown Business Journal, 1/14/21) Meanwhile, Parma City Schools is starting the second year of its parent university. No cutesy name is appended to it, its offerings are noted several times as being free of charge, and the sample listing of activities provides quite a contrast from the Youngstown one. Quite. (Cleveland.com, 1/14/21)
    
4. And finally: Buy your lottery tickets today, folks. It’s for the kids. (WKBN-TV, Youngstown, 1/14/21)

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