At New River Community College in rural Virginia, career coach Stephanie Addikis noticed something small this week while walking past the advising office: the box of Legos and coloring books she’d stocked nearby had gone soft and well-loved. Nobody had asked for it to be used. It simply was. That quiet kind of room-making showed up again this week — in a new flight path opening out of Nashville, an invitation to line Murfreesboro’s Main Street in December, and the twenty-year arc of a painter who started before she could tie her shoes.
Colleges Are Finding Small Ways to Make Room for Student Parents
Addikis stocks that busy box because a lot of the students walking into New River’s advising office are also parents, and nobody there had ever counted exactly how many. That’s common: a report from The Institute for College Access & Success found that roughly a quarter of students at rural-serving colleges are raising kids, yet those colleges are less likely than their urban counterparts to offer campus childcare.
“I don’t think we realized how many kids were coming on campus until we put these out, and now they’re really being utilized,” Addikis said.
With little data and even less dedicated funding, colleges are leaning on what they already have. Roane State Community College in East Tennessee is partnering with a national nonprofit to better track its student parents, while others are working with local churches, women’s shelters and United Way chapters to connect them to resources. In Texas, Tarrant County College opened new childcare centers with help from the county and a childcare nonprofit.
Student parents are more likely to be first-generation, low-income, and students of color — and those added pressures make them less likely to graduate. What they’re asking for, researchers found, isn’t one big program. It’s to be seen by the people already teaching and advising them.
Read the full story at Reasons to be Cheerful.
Murfreesboro’s Christmas Parade Is Looking for a Few Good Floats
Murfreesboro Parks and Recreation has opened registration for this year’s Christmas Parade, set for Sunday, Dec. 13 at 2 p.m. along Main Street through historic downtown. This year’s theme: “A Country Christmas.”
Organizers are inviting floats, walking groups, antique cars, dancers, street performers and horses — pretty much anyone willing to show up and wave. Applications close Monday, Dec. 7.
It’s a small civic ritual, but it’s also a request: come be part of this, in person, downtown, together. That’s worth saying twice.
Read the full story at Rutherford Source.
Nashville’s Airport Is Opening a New Door to Mexico City
Starting in June 2027, Nashville International Airport will offer nonstop flights to Mexico City — Aeromexico’s first-ever route into Music City, flown through its alliance with Delta. Four flights a week, year-round, on Embraer 190 jets.
Doug Kreulen, president and CEO of the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority, called it a significant milestone for the airport’s push to expand international travel out of Middle Tennessee. From Mexico City’s hub, Aeromexico connects to more than 100 destinations across Mexico and 23 other countries — meaning a direct flight out of BNA now opens onto a much bigger map.
Read the full story at Rutherford Source.
The Five-Year-Old Painter Nobody Believed, Twenty Years Later
When Autumn de Forest was five, she picked up a paintbrush. By six, she’d talked her father into getting her a booth at a local art-in-the-park show. People stopped by, assumed the paintings were her dad’s, and were startled to learn otherwise — some thought it had to be a trick.
She painted through the doubt anyway. By fourteen, she had a daily studio routine that would exhaust most adults: a morning painting session, a full day of online schoolwork built around her travel, then three or four more hours in the studio before bed.
The proof piled up. A painting sold for $25,000 at auction when she was eight. By her teens, her work had brought in more than $7 million, much of which went to charities and disaster relief. In 2015, an award for painting carried her to the Vatican for a private showing with Pope Francis. At sixteen, she worked with the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, leading painting workshops in underprivileged schools around the country.
She’s 25 now, still painting, still represented by one of the world’s largest art dealers. The people at that first art-in-the-park booth who assumed a grown man must have made the work were only wrong about the artist — not about the talent.
Read the full story at Upworthy.
Different scales, same instinct: a box of toys left out just in case, an open invitation down Main Street, a new flight path, two decades of believing a five-year-old before there was proof. Making room for someone, before they’ve earned it, turns out to be most of the job. If something’s going right in your corner of the Boro, tell us about it.