Then a student’s life was upended.

A group of high school students try desperately to make it through an isolated and dire year.

In Hobbs, New Mexico, the high school closed and football was cancelled, while just across the state line in Texas, students seemed to be living nearly normal lives. Here’s how pandemic school closures exact their emotional toll on young people.

In 1978, an eighth grader killed his teacher. After 20 months in a psychiatric facility, he was freed. His classmates still wonder: What really happened?

How Texas Instruments monopolized math class.

How demons destroyed a Florida school.

On surfer girls in Maui; the story that led to the film Blue Crush.

How a hacker shamed and humiliated high school girls in a small New Hampshire town, and how they helped take him down.

Sabika Sheikh, a Muslim exchange student from Pakistan with dreams of changing the world, struck up an unlikely friendship with an evangelical Christian girl. The two became inseparable—until the day a fellow student opened fire.

“Stupid kids doing something stupid, simple as that. This is how many people in Baraboo remembered the whole ordeal to me four months later. What almost no one in town seemed interested in asking was, ‘Why were our kids stupid in this particular way?’”

“I had inherited a Rolodex full of useful phone numbers (the College Board, a helpful counselor in the UCLA admissions office), but the number I kept handing out was that of a family therapist.”

These Boston high school valedictorians set off to change the world. But good grades only got them so far. Is Boston failing its brightest students? A five-part series about the students left behind.

Can a violent adult jail teach kids to love school? A rare look inside one of the only high schools at an adult jail

At 15, Ruben Urbina couldn’t bear his depression and anxiety anymore. So he called police with a chilling threat.

Tales of teenage romance.

On whether kids should be protected or pushed.

Odessa High School students know her as “Betty,” a ghost that haunts the auditorium at night.  But few know much about the real Betty, whose 1961 murder was “the most sensational crime in West Texas in its day.”

He’s got 50,000 Instagram followers. He’s been offered several college scholarships. He just played his first high school basketball game.

Memories and violence resurface at a high school reunion.

At 33, Wendy Brown stole her daughter’s name, grabbed a pair of pom-poms, and went back to high school. Then she went to jail.

“She scrolls, she waits. For that little notification box to appear.”

A backyard wrestling match; an examination of different young lives.

Navigating life as a brilliant teenage girl.

Most of the country is trying to keep guns out of schools. A town in rural Idaho is taking the opposite approach.

Religion, high school football, and racial problems in small town America.