On a recent Tuesday morning in a kindergarten classroom at Momentum Academy, teacher Caroline Simmons knelt beside a student who had gotten out of his seat for the fourth time in five minutes — and they were only an hour into the school day.
“He’s not misbehaving,” she said softly. “His brain just wants to do a million things at once.”
For Simmons, a first-year teacher, moments like this capture both the joy and the strain of the profession. They also highlight what many Missouri educators say has become one of the biggest challenges in today’s classrooms: students arriving with different needs, less experience in structured learning environments and higher levels of support required to keep them engaged…