When Addeline Brindle woke up on March 29, 2018, she knew instantly that something was wrong. She had put her 3-month-old baby, Tre’Velle, to sleep in the bed beside her, but now he wasn’t moving. Brindle, 19 at the time, frantically ran around the house where she was visiting two friends, yelling for help. One called 911 and the other, trained in first aid, checked on the baby.

It started with a cell phone. Last summer, Jay (not her real name), a 16-year-old living in upstate New York, was convinced a woman had taken her mother’s phone, police say, and went to the woman’s house with three friends to retrieve it. They broke in, according to police, and took some other things—including jewelry and makeup—while they were there.

As his bus exited the Garden State Parkway, Maurice Cherry gazed out the window, waiting for the precise moment when the gleaming silhouette of Atlantic City would swim into view. Suddenly there it was, lit up like noon even at midnight. Most of the passengers seemed unimpressed. They woke up slowly from their naps, massaging their necks and groping around for their belongings. But Mr. Cherry, a diminutive 37-year-old wearing a baggy black Atlantic City sweatshirt, was thrilled. “We’re here,” he said, flashing a jack-o’-lantern smile. “It’s going to be a beautiful night.”

As news spread last fall that Eva Moskowitz, founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools, was being considered for education secretary by then-President-elect Donald Trump, some fellow Democrats were apoplectic. How could Moskowitz, whose schools serve mostly low-income families of color, align herself with a staunchly conservative administration?

The strange saga of a Park Slope principal accused of promoting communism took another turn Wednesday, when her request for a temporary halt to the probe against her was denied. Jill Bloomberg, principal of Park Slope Collegiate, is known for her activism, particularly around the issue of school segregation. But the Department of Education says now she’s gone too far by sharing her political views at school and “actively recruiting” students into a communist organization.

At first it seemed like an innocent flirtation. Shaneiqua was 12 years old and walking around Brownsville, Brooklyn, when a man pulled up alongside her in a car and called to her from his window. “He was just, like, ‘You’re cute. I really see myself being with you.’ Stuff like that,” she said. Shaneiqua had just run away from home and had nowhere to go, so she got into his car. It was a decision that changed her life.

Dozens of students at Townsend Harris, a top Queens high school, took to the hallways Thursday to express their frustration with Interim Acting Principal Rosemarie Jahoda, who replaced Principal Anthony Barbetta in September. “Our goal was to show that students felt the difference between the school atmosphere before Mrs. Jahoda came and after,” said Student Union President Alex Chen, who helped organize the sit-in. “The atmosphere she created is impossible for us to work with.”

In one of Darryl Thompson’s last photos, he is wearing a blue cap and gown and gripping a rolled-up diploma from Public School 360 in the Bronx. A proud smile dents his cheeks and big fake diamonds glint from his ears. It is a sweet face tinged with mischief, not a bad reflection, his friends say, of how he lived his life. That life ended on Nov. 18 in Johnstown, N.Y., in a bathroom of the Tryon Boys Residential Center, a juvenile rehabilitative center where he had been sent after a string of crimes, including burglary and robbery.

New York City schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña knows she has something to prove. When she started in 2014, she seemed intent on moving the nation’s largest school system away from the aggressive policies of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who closed more than 150 schools. Since then, Fariña has established her own program for struggling schools, created new training programs for teachers, and worked to transform school discipline.

When Rufus Dantzler was released from a New York State prison in 2004 after serving 14 years for murder, he was ordered by the state’s parole office to get treatment for alcoholism and marijuana abuse. But when he arrived at the program, which was run by Greenwich House, a nonprofit group in Manhattan, he was told that he would have to pay for treatment because his Medicaid coverage had not yet started. Without a job, that was simply not an option, said Mr. Dantzler, who was convicted of killing a family friend in Harlem in 1989. “I just walked right out,” he said.

New York City schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña was on hand to welcome families Monday morning at P.S. 58, the Queens school visited Thursday by federal immigration agents. The agents inquired about a fourth-grade student, but did not have a warrant and were turned away by school officials. While it now appears the agents were not seeking to question the fourth-grader, Fariña is clearly mindful of how the agents’ visit could impact immigrant families already skittish about President Trump’s immigration reforms.

Heidi Messenger stabbed her boyfriend. That much is fact—but it’s not the whole story. On May 25, 2002, she recalls, they spent much of the day drinking and fighting, a combination that had proven dangerous several times before. At home in their apartment in Port Jervis, New York, he attacked her, she said, beating her with the body of a vacuum cleaner and threatening to kill her.

When students return to school on Thursday, they’ll be chitchatting, jostling and sizing each other up. They probably won’t notice the shiny floors beneath their feet, not to mention the freshly scrubbed bathrooms or newly painted banisters. But that doesn’t bother William Fuller, a cleaner at P.S. 314 in the Bronx. At 52, he has been cleaning schools for 18 years. “We all take good pride in our work,” he said. “When you have kids, you try to make sure everything is good for them,” he added, n

Around 8:30 p.m., a fat gray bus bound for Atlantic City pulls up on Division Street in Chinatown. Its doors wheeze open, and a line of riders shuffle into formation, clutching pink tickets and plastic shopping bags, and sucking a few final drags from their cigarettes before flicking them away. The ritual takes no more than 15 minutes, but it happens dozens of times a day as buses headed to Trump Plaza, Foxwoods or other casinos load and unload passengers in the V formed by the Bowery and Division Street.

When the NAACP called for a moratorium on charter schools last fall, the group’s president and CEO Cornell Brooks said the group wanted a “reasoned pause,” not a “doomsday destruction” of charters. Still, it ignited a firestorm among charter school supporters and sparked a series of hearings nationwide, the last of which was held Thursday in New York City. But rather than a heated debate, the panelists and public speakers took pains to find common ground.

Brian can hardly remember a time when he wasn’t medicated. Diagnosed with depression and attention deficit disorder as a 7-year-old in foster care, he was prescribed Paxil, Ritalin and Clonidine. Now a soft-spoken 15-year-old sporting braces and a baggy t-shirt, he’s learning to live without meds for the first time. “I can notice myself more,” he says. “I realize more who I am.”

Karen Curley ran into something surprising as she headed into her Park Slope gym on Wednesday: protesters pushing back against the city’s strategy to give her a job. Curley, 61, a Department of Education social worker who used to work in District 17, has been rotating through different positions for at least two years. She is a member of the Absent Teacher Reserve, the pool of teachers without permanent assignments that is once again at the center of debate over how the city should manage teachers and spend money.

It was a rainy and windswept Saturday in Rockaway Park, but nothing could keep the twins off the field. Eleven years old, tiny and virtually indistinguishable, Troy and Troyvon Young had traveled more than hour to southern Queens from Louis Pink Houses, a crime-plagued public housing project in East New York, Brooklyn, to practice their favorite new sport: lacrosse. Although it has gained broader popularity in recent years, lacrosse is still typically played by well-heeled middle- and upper-middle-class youngsters who have grown up in places with wide-open fields of green. On this day, a very different population was getting a crack at the game.

Beneath the courtyard of the Mansion House, a stately Brooklyn Heights co-op, lies a tangled mess of roots that has prompted a tangled mess of local politics. The roots belong to a towering American elm that stands in the garden courtyard of 145 Hicks Street, a brick building with about 100 units. The tree’s roots are making it hard to repair two leaks in the building’s foundation, and residents are split over whether the tree should live or die.

In the days and weeks after last July’s police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, teachers across New York grappled with how to talk about race and police violence. But for Sentell Harper, a theater teacher at Success Academy Bronx 2, those conversations had started long before. CNN recently interviewed Harper about a spoken-word piece he created for his fourth-grade students to perform about what it means to be black and male in America.