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The Best Way to Write College Essays About Moving

Admissions officer reviewed by Ben Bousquet, M.Ed Former Vanderbilt University

Written by Alex McNeil, MA Admissions Consultant

Key Takeaway

Moving’s a big deal, especially when you’re in high school.

New state, new city, new school, new family dynamics, new friends—new everything, it may seem.

If you’ve recently moved, or if you’ve moved a lot throughout your life, you might be thinking about writing your college essay about moving.

Moving can work well as a personal statement topic, particularly when the experience shows your resilience and ability to adapt to new situations.

But because the topic is somewhat common, it can be risky if not done well.

In this post, we go over a few ways to approach a college essay about moving to avoid some of the biggest pitfalls and cliches.

Three Ways to Approach Your College Essay About Moving

Across the tens of thousands of college essays we’ve read, the following three approaches tend to produce great college essays about moving. They help writers avoid cliches and focus in on something deeply meaningful and strengths-based (remember: that’s the whole point of a college essay to begin with!).

Personal Insight

The first way you can think about your personal statement is by considering how your story about moving can reveal a personal insight about yourself to admissions officers.

Let me give you an example.

Emma moved from rural Montana to Los Angeles for her mom’s job. Sure, she could write about how she was shocked by the drastic weather differences, how she had to learn how to navigate a big city, or how she went from being in a school with 50 students to one with over 3,000.

Those topics would be interesting, but none would help us learn much about who Emma is or why we should admit her to our school.

To reveal a personal insight, Emma will have to be a bit more vulnerable and strategic. Let’s say that Emma wants to study agriculture. Emma’s college essay about moving would be more effective if it explored how she came to realize her love of agriculture only after she left her rural hometown.

Family Context

But maybe moving didn’t teach you something about yourself. Maybe it taught you about your family. Or perhaps you feel like admissions officers need to know about your family’s story to truly understand you.

This approach appears most often among students whose families have moved a lot because of a parent’s job or among those who have had a lot of changes in their home lives. Sharing your story, including the details of how a situation affected you personally, can help admissions officers learn about where you come from.

You can write about your experiences through the lens of resilience, diversity, or even joy or curiosity.

Lesson Learned

Finally, you can also approach your college essay about moving by reflecting on a significant lesson you learned throughout the process. Note that the key word here is significant .

Lessons like “I learned that I was strong and could handle anything thrown my way” or “I learned who my true friends were” are nice lessons, but they aren’t weighty enough for a college essay. Those kinds of lessons are too generic to actually tell admissions officers anything about who you are.

Let’s return to Emma for this example.

Instead of writing about how moving influenced her to study agriculture, Emma could also write about the lessons in diversity she learned when moving from a homogenous rural town to a big, diverse city.

Two Cliches to Avoid in Your College Essay About Moving

Okay, now that we’ve gone over three solid approaches, let’s go over what not to do.

Since college essays about moving are pretty common, you’ll want to avoid these overused and cliche methods. Your admissions officers will have read them a thousand times already, so they won’t be doing you any favors.

“Moving was the worst thing that ever happened to me…even though it wasn’t that bad.”

Listen. I know that moving can be really difficult. If moving was truly the most difficult thing you’ve experienced, then consider one of the approaches from above.

But too many applicants overstate the difficulty of their move solely because they think they have to write about something traumatic to get into college.

This approach leads to inauthentic essays that appear like they’re trying to pull the wool over the admissions officer’s eyes.

You don’t need to write about trauma, or even a difficult topic in general, in your college applications.

“Moving caused my grades to drop.”

The other big cliche that surfaces again and again in college essays about moving is the big Grade Drop following a move.

Moving can be such a disruption that it’s unsurprising if it affected your grades. It also makes sense that you want admissions officers to know that there’s a legitimate (and temporary) reason behind those less-than-perfect grades on your transcript.

But the problem with this approach is that it takes one of the most valuable pieces of application real estate—your personal statement—and fills it with information that probably belongs in the Additional Information section of the Common App.

Instead, save your personal statement for a topic that draws out your strengths and says something meaningful about who you are.

The Big Picture

Not every college essay needs to be written about a challenge. If your experience with moving has deep personal meaning, you can try it out in your personal statement.

But remember that you can also address something like moving in your additional information section.

Ultimately, you need to craft essays that say something personal about you while showcasing your strengths. It’s all part of what it means to create a cohesive application narrative .

Liked that? Try this next.

How to Write a Personal Statement for Colleges

12 Common App Essay Examples (Graded by Former Admissions Officers)

The Incredible Power of a Cohesive College Application

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We built the best admissions chancer in the world . How is it the best? It draws from our experience in top-10 admissions offices to show you how selective admissions actually works.

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1.  Introduction

2.  previous literature, 3.  a framework for mobility: why do students make nonstructural moves and how does mobility affect performance, 4.  empirical strategy, 5.  data, measures, and descriptive statistics, 6.  results, 7.  conclusions, acknowledgments, moving matters: the causal effect of moving schools on student performance.

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Amy Ellen Schwartz , Leanna Stiefel , Sarah A. Cordes; Moving Matters: The Causal Effect of Moving Schools on Student Performance. Education Finance and Policy 2017; 12 (4): 419–446. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00198

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Policy makers and analysts often view the reduction of student mobility across schools as a way to improve academic performance. Prior work indicates that children do worse in the year of a school move, but has been largely unsuccessful in isolating the causal effects of mobility. We use longitudinal data on students in New York City public elementary and middle schools to isolate the causal effects of school moves on student performance. We account for observed and time-invariant differences between movers and non-movers using rich data on student sociodemographic and education program characteristics and student fixed effects. To address the potential endogeneity of school moves arising from unobserved, time-varying factors, we use three sets of plausibly exogenous instruments for mobility: first-grade school grade span, grade span of zoned middle school, and building sale. We find that in the medium term, students making structural moves perform significantly worse in both English language arts (ELA) and math, whereas those making nonstructural moves experience a significant increase in ELA performance. In the short term, there is an additional negative effect for structural moves in ELA. These effects are meaningful in magnitude and results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications, instruments, and samples.

Policy makers and analysts often view the reduction of student mobility across schools as a way to improve academic performance. Indeed, the preponderance of existing research indicates that children do worse in the year of a school move (Rumberger 2003 , 2015 ; GAO 2010 ), although in many respects the empirical base for this conclusion is lacking. Much of the existing work is best viewed as correlational rather than causal, with the observed lower performance of movers confounding the impact of mobility with unobserved determinants of moves. Moreover, most current work tends to ignore many nuances of school moves, despite the likelihood that the impact will depend on the timing and context of the move. Perhaps most importantly, moves that are structurally mandated when a student reaches the terminal grade of his current school and that take place only in the summer, are likely to have different effects than nonstructural moves which are made because of residential relocations, family dissolution, acceptance into preferred programs, and so forth, and which can occur either in the summer or middle of a school year. With one notable exception, much of the prior research fails to separate structural from nonstructural moves, ignoring their very different genesis and potential difference in impacts. Conversely, research that examines them separately—focusing on one and ignoring the other—is also problematic because the two types of moves are likely related, as parents consider both prior and anticipated mobility when making decisions about whether to change schools. Thus, studying one type of move to the exclusion of the other will not fully illuminate the effects of either type of move and may yield biased impact estimates. Finally, existing mobility research focuses on short-term impacts—typically on performance in the year of the move—providing little insight into medium-term effects that may affect learning several years later. If the medium-term effects of mobility on student performance are negative (positive), changes in policy may well be warranted to reduce (increase) mobility and/or to ameliorate the effects. If, however, short-term effects do not persist, then policy efforts may be better focused on facilitating adjustment and acclimation.

In this paper, we use longitudinal data on students in New York City (NYC) public elementary and middle schools to isolate the causal effects of school moves on student academic performance. Using student-level regression models, we account for observed and time-invariant differences between movers and non-movers with rich demographic data on student sociodemographic and education program characteristics as well as student fixed effects. To address the potential endogeneity of school moves arising from unobserved, time-varying factors, we use three sets of plausibly exogenous instruments for mobility in order to provide sufficient sources of exogenous variation for our multiple endogenous school move variables.

First, we exploit the relationship between grade span and mobility. Drawing on Rockoff and Lockwood ( 2010 ) and Schwerdt and West ( 2013 ), we construct instruments for mobility (both structural and nonstructural) using the grade span of a student's first-grade school . The underlying intuition is as follows. School grade span implies a future transition point at which a student must move to another school. This ultimately shapes decisions about the timing of both structural and nonstructural moves because parents balance the costs and benefits of making a move at a non-mandated time versus allowing their child to remain in the school until the next mandated move. The implication is that the grade span of a student's first-grade school can serve as an instrument for later mobility, both structural and nonstructural.

Second, we use the grade span of a student's zoned middle school with the reasoning that parents may be more likely to have their child make a structural move if there is a seamless transition between elementary and zoned middle schools (i.e., a student in a K–5 elementary school zoned for a grades 6–8 middle school), whereas they may be more likely to have their child make a nonstructural move if there is overlap in the grades offered by a student's zoned middle school and his current school (i.e., a student in a K–6 elementary school is zoned for a grades 6–8 middle school). 1

Third, we use indicators of the sale of the building in which a student lives , and focus our analysis on the roughly 80 percent of public school students who live in renter households. Because building sale reflects characteristics or decisions of a building's owner , the timing of sale is plausibly random for renters living in those buildings. Thus, the sale creates an exogenous, unanticipated shock to residential stability that may induce school mobility as families relocate to housing farther away from their child's current school. To be clear, students in rental housing are, on average, more likely to be disadvantaged and experience housing instability than students in owner-occupied housing, so that our empirical work will shed light on the impacts of mobility for a large population of urban students. 2

Our paper adds to the growing literature on student mobility by ( 1 ) directly addressing the endogeneity of mobility using student fixed effects and three different sets of credible instrumental variables to derive causal estimates of mobility's effects; (2) estimating the differential impact of mobility across timing and context, distinguishing between summer and mid-year moves, and (within the category of summer moves) further distinguishing structural from nonstructural moves, and articulated moves (made into the new school's lowest grade served) from nonarticulated moves (made into the middle of the grade span); ( 3 ) examining the medium-term impacts of mobility on student performance at the end of middle school; and (4) estimating the effects of mobility on students in rental housing in a large urban school district. Drawing together the separate literatures on mobility (i.e., nonstructural moves) and grade span (i.e., structural moves), we explore and exploit the relationship between structural and nonstructural moves, past moves and anticipated moves, and housing and schools, in order to shed new, nuanced insight into the impact of mobility on academic performance.

To preview the results, we find that mobility has significant and heterogeneous effects in both the short and medium term. In the medium term, students making structural moves perform significantly worse in both English language arts (ELA) and math, whereas those making nonstructural moves experience a significant increase in ELA performance only. In the short term, there is an additional negative effect for structural moves in ELA but not math, whereas nonstructural moves have no additional short-term effect in either subject. Finally, our findings suggest that articulated moves, made to start a destination school in its lowest grade, are driving the positive effect of nonstructural moves for ELA. Thus, our estimates indicate that the type of mobility most commonly ignored in the literature (structural) has long-term negative consequences for both math and ELA performance, and articulated, nonstructural moves have significant positive consequences for ELA. These effects are meaningful in magnitude and the results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications, instruments, and samples. Importantly, they speak to the effects of mobility among some of the most vulnerable populations of students—those living in rental housing who are disproportionately poor and underperforming.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a review of the literature, followed by a framework for understanding mobility in section 3 . Section 4 describes the identification strategy and empirical models, and data are discussed in section 5 . Results are presented in section 6 . We conclude with a discussion and consideration of implications for policy and future research.

Early literature is practically unanimous in finding that school moves are associated with dips in academic performance. (See Mehana and Reynolds 2004 for a meta-analysis of quantitative studies from 1975 to 1994; Reynolds, Chen, and Herbers 2009 for a meta-analysis of quantitative studies from 1990 to 2008; and Rumberger 2015 for a more recent overview of the mobility literature.) These findings, however, are based primarily on cross-sectional data, lack refinement in their measurement of mobility, omit controls for important covariates, and are not based on an empirical approach that addresses unobserved student and family characteristics that lead to some school moves. Thus, the results are best viewed as correlational, establishing that students who move also tend to have lower performance.

The next generation of studies takes a more nuanced approach, using longitudinal data to more finely characterize moves, explore the number of moves made over a student's academic career, and control for a multitude of family and individual characteristics, including pre-move academic performance. These studies suggest there may be greater heterogeneity in the impact of mobility than described by previous work, finding that reductions in performance are cumulative with the number of moves. In a study of Baltimore's first through fifth graders, Alexander, Entwisle, and Dauber ( 1996 ) find that controlling for student background and first-grade test scores, there is a significant negative relationship between the number of school moves and fifth grade reading (but not math) performance. In their study of Chicago low-income, black seventh graders, however, Temple and Reynolds ( 2000 ) find that both math and reading scores decline with each additional move even when controlling for student characteristics and kindergarten performance.

A second set of longitudinal studies uses nationally representative data (NELS:88) collected by the National Center for Education Statistics to analyze the relationship between mobility and high school students’ performance and graduation outcomes. These data include richly detailed characteristics of students and their families as well as information on school and residential moves. These studies find that moves involving both residential and school changes are associated with large reductions in math (but not reading) performance (Pribesh and Downey 1999 ) and also with a decreased probability of graduation (Rumberger and Larson 1998 ; Swanson and Schneider 1999 ). Swanson and Schneider ( 1999 ) find that the relationship varies with the timing of the move, with early moves (before tenth grade) having a positive association with math score gains between tenth and twelfth grades and late moves (between grades 10 and 12) having a negative association. Critically, this generation of longitudinal studies does not distinguish mid-year mobility, include student fixed effects to minimize the influence of unobserved characteristics associated with moving, or address possible endogeneity of moves. Further, because the data are drawn from high school students, these studies focus almost exclusively on nonstructural mobility.

In the most recent wave of longitudinal studies, researchers include student fixed effects to mitigate potential bias due to unobserved time invariant differences between movers and non-movers. Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin ( 2004 ) model annual gains in math scores using three cohorts of Texas elementary school students to examine the relationship between various types of nonstructural moves made within and across districts and regions in Texas. Using a single aggregated measure of mobility, they find a negative and significant coefficient on gain scores, but estimates are sensitive to the specification of the model and to controls for school quality. 3 Most relevant to our study, they find that within-district moves decrease score gains on the order of 0.024 to 0.088 standard deviation (SD), but this study fails to consider the impacts of structural mobility, such that the comparison group is composed of both movers and non-movers.

In another study, Grigg ( 2012 ) uses longitudinal data on elementary and middle school students in Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools to examine the relationship between various kinds of moves (between-year compulsory, between-year noncompulsory, within-year compulsory, and within-year noncompulsory) and achievement growth. Exploiting a policy change that created an exogenous shock to the timing of structural moves, Grigg finds that all types of moves are associated with lower achievement growth in the year immediately following the move. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the move itself, net of other factors, may influence achievement. Although the Grigg study makes a substantial contribution to the literature by exploring whether impacts of school mobility vary by the timing and context of the move and includes student fixed effects to lessen bias from time-invariant differences between movers and non-movers, it does not directly address the endogeneity of school moves arising from unobserved, time-varying factors. This suggests that the findings, particularly those regarding the impacts of between-year noncompulsory moves, may be biased.

Most school mobility literature focuses exclusively on nonstructural moves, yet there is a separate body of work on the relationship between grade span and academic achievement that focuses almost exclusively on structural moves. In the grade span literature, authors consistently find that academic performance dips as students move from lower schools (elementary schools) to upper-level schools (i.e., middle or junior high schools; see Rockoff and Lockwood 2010 ; Schwartz et al. 2011 ; and Schwerdt and West 2013 , for recent examples). More generally, Schwartz et al. ( 2011 ) find a negative relationship between school transitions—whether structural or nonstructural—and academic performance. 4

Taken together, these findings indicate that both nonstructural and structural moves may matter for student performance. Thus, although the grade span and mobility literatures have been remarkably separate in considering these different moves, fully understanding the effects of student mobility likely requires simultaneous consideration of structural and nonstructural moves, which we do here.

Why Do Students Make Nonstructural Moves?

Students make nonstructural moves for either voluntary reasons, where the timing and destination of the move are chosen by the family, or involuntary reasons, where the timing and destination are largely determined by shocks to the household (see Grigg 2012 and Rumberger 2015 for detailed discussion of typology of moves).

To understand why parents and families would choose to move, we draw on an economic approach to parent (family or student) decision making. In this approach, parents decide whether (and when) to move their student from one school to another by weighing the present value of the costs and benefits of available schooling options. Parents choose to move their child from school A to school B if the gain in the student's performance (or utility, human capital, etc.) is sufficient to offset the costs of moving. 5 In our discussion below, we focus on the mobility decision made at the family level, and therefore focus on costs to mobile students and their parents. There are also costs of mobility to schools (i.e., processing and acclimating new students) and to classmates (i.e., negative consequences of exposure to high levels of churn in their schools and classrooms), which we do not consider here.

Costs of moving arise from a variety of sources including the following: ( 1 ) administrative costs, which might include filling out new forms, providing documentation, and taking placement exams; (2) logistical costs, which might include making arrangements for transportation, after-school activities, and so on; and (3) psychic costs, which might arise from adjusting to new routines, adapting to a new physical space, and so forth. In addition, there may be a loss of social capital among both students and parents, which is likely to decrease student performance. For example, school mobility may disrupt a student's peer network, and at the same time reduce parents’ information about school policies and culture. After the disruption of peer networks, mobile students may be more likely to associate with lower-performing and/or more deviant peers (Phelan, Davidson, and Yu 1998 ; South and Haynie 2004 ; Haynie, South, and Bose 2006 ; Dupere et al. 2015 ) and suffer both socially and psychologically (Rumberger et al. 1999 ; Dupere et al. 2015 ). Finally, there may be a cost due to differences between the academic programs and curricula in the old and new schools ( curricular mismatch ), which could also affect performance. As an example, if two schools cover mathematical topics differently, students who move may find themselves either over or underprepared for the material being taught at the destination school.

Potential benefits are also myriad—the new school may offer a higher achieving peer group which in turn may increase a student's own performance (Hanushek et al. 2003 ) or a curriculum better matched to a student's learning (or just one that is more preferred). It may offer access to better transportation, after-school options, and so on. The disruption to peer groups and friendship networks may, indeed, be a good thing if, for example, the student had been bullied or fallen in with a bad crowd at the origin school. Thus, mobility may, in principle, yield net positive effects on student performance. 6

Because the costs and benefits of mobility depend upon the length of time a student spends (or would spend) in each alternative school, this suggests that parents will consider both prior and anticipated future moves when making their decision. Put simply, the benefit of attending a better school is likely to be increasing in the number of years a student attends that school and the cost of remaining in a worse school will similarly increase with the number of years he stays in that school. 7 Thus, the probability that a student will move to a better school is increasing in the number of years until the next structural move at both the origin and destination schools. As an example, parents will be more likely to move their child from a mismatched or low-quality K–5 elementary school at the end of third grade than at the end of fourth grade because the fourth grader will enjoy the benefits of any new school for less time than the third grader will, other things constant. Similarly, parents will also consider the grade span of nearby middle schools. For example, parents will be more likely to move their children at the end of fifth grade than at the end of fourth grade if the closest middle school starts in grade six because moving their child in fourth grade would result in multiple moves over a short period of time.

Under this framework, students will make voluntary nonstructural moves if and only if parents decide that the benefits of the move ultimately outweigh the costs. That is, if they expect their child to be better off even after the disruption of a nonstructural move. Therefore, one would expect children making such voluntary, nonstructural moves to perform better or no differently than their peers, on average. Conversely, involuntary moves will tend to be precipitated by unforeseen events where parents are unable to weigh the costs and benefits of a mobility decision, such that these involuntary structural moves might well harm performance. The implication is that effects of mobility are likely to be heterogeneous, with some moves improving student outcomes and others proving harmful. Although the mobility literature does acknowledge this potential heterogeneity (Rumberger 2015 ), as noted previously, there is only one other study of which we are aware that attempts to empirically differentiate the impacts of mobility across timing and context (Grigg 2012 ).

How Might Mobility Affect Performance?

Given that every move is accompanied by a different set of costs and benefits, the effect of mobility on performance is likely to depend, at least in part, on the context of the move. Structural moves may be less costly than nonstructural moves if schools provide supports or processes to ease transitions (e.g., orientation programs, freshman social events) and/or design instruction to stem losses in student performances due to curricular mismatch. Similarly, articulated nonstructural moves (made to start in the destination school on time) may be less costly than nonarticulated moves (where students join a new school in the middle of its grade span). Following a similar logic, involuntary nonstructural moves made in response to a shock may be more harmful than voluntary nonstructural moves where parents are able to optimize the timing and context.

In the end, decisions about whether, and when, to move schools are clearly complicated, reflecting multiple motivations that are beyond the scope of this paper to specifically identify. Rather, we draw the following key insights from our conceptual framework, which informs our empirical efforts to estimate causal effects of moves: ( 1 ) the effects on performance are likely to vary with the timing and context of mobility; (2) structural and nonstructural moves are related to one another and should be considered simultaneously, rather than in isolation; (3) anticipated mobility shapes the likelihood of mobility in any year and, because both the terminal grade of a student's first-grade school and the entry grade of a student's middle school determine anticipated future mobility, they also predict mobility each year; and (4) unanticipated mobility is related to changes in life circumstances, such as changes in housing. 8 We use these insights in the empirical strategy below.

The primary challenges to identifying the causal effects of school moves on student performance are that (1) movers are likely to be different from non-movers and (2) moves may be endogenous. We propose, in turn, solutions to each of these challenges.

First, movers are likely to be different from non-movers in many ways. For example, households/children who move may be more ambitious and forward-looking (potentially leading to upwardly biased estimates) or more irresponsible and transient (potentially leading to downwardly biased estimates). To address this, we use student fixed effects to capture time-invariant differences between students and families, such as general propensity to move schools, supplemented by a variety of time-varying student characteristics.

Second, mobility may reflect factors that change over time, including those that relate directly to schooling (e.g., fit or opportunity) and those that relate only indirectly (e.g., housing or employment). Without accounting for these factors, any observed relationship between mobility and student performance may be spurious, reflecting changes in life circumstances rather than the impact of mobility per se. We address this concern with instrumental variables. In particular, we use three alternative sets of instruments representing three different sources of variation: a set based upon the grade span of a student's first-grade school, a set based on the entry grade of a student's zoned middle school, and a set based on the sale of the building where a student lives, which are credibly exogenous for our sample of students living in rental housing.

As described earlier, the grade span variables will predict both structural and nonstructural moves—the terminal grade of a student's first-grade school will be highly correlated with the year in which that student makes a structural move. It will also capture, in some part, the potential net benefit (or net cost) of making a nonstructural move and, thus, the probability of making a nonstructural move in any given year. Similarly, the grade span of a student's middle school is correlated with the year in which a student will make a structural or nonstructural move. If the entry grade of a student's middle school is one grade higher than the terminal grade of his elementary school, this will increase the probability that a student makes a structural move. Conversely, if the entry grade of a student's zoned middle school is the same as the terminal grade of his first-grade school, he might be more likely to make a nonstructural move in order to begin middle school on time. Put differently, the likelihood of a nonstructural move increases when grade spans of elementary and middle schools overlap than if they align.

For these instruments to be valid, it is only required that shocks to student achievement are not anticipated by families, conditional on student controls and fixed effects, and are therefore not reflected in the choice of grade configuration of either a student's first-grade elementary school or the middle school of that student's first-grade ZIP code. Similar instruments have been used in other work examining the impacts of grade configuration and middle school entry grade (see Rockoff and Lockwood 2010 ; Schwerdt and West 2013 ).

The building sale variables will predict nonstructural moves, as they capture shocks to family housing that may precipitate more unanticipated, reactive moves made with little regard to schooling per se. Because our analysis focuses on a sample of students living in rental units, and building sale reflects the characteristics of owners , this should meet the exclusion restriction. 9

Long-term Effects of Mobility on Academic Performance

Instrumental variables.

Our second set of instruments mirrors the first, using the entry grade of a student's zoned middle school (as of first grade) rather than the terminal grade of his first-grade school. To be specific, we identify a student's zoned middle school as the middle school located closest to the centroid of his first-grade residence ZIP code. We then construct a set of variables capturing the number of years until the student reaches the entry grade of that middle school ( YearsPreMS) or after ( YearsPostMS), and a dummy variable that takes a value of 1 in the year that the student's current grade is equal to the entry grade of his zoned middle school ( Entry ). 14 In an alternative specification, we include the squares of YearsPreMS and YearsPostMS as instruments; in another, we replace YearsPreMS and YearsPostMS with a full set of entry grade indicator variables interacted with the student's current grade, η gE , where g is student i ’s current grade and E is the entry grade of student i ’s zoned middle school. As with the first-grade terminal grade instruments, in the results below we show results using both the quadratic and nonparametric forms of middle school entry grade.

Our third set of instruments exploits building sale for students living in rental housing. We create indicators for whether a student's rental housing building in t was sold between t − 2 and t − 1, interacting this variable with a set of building type dummies (2–4 family, 5-plus family, and other building type) to allow for different effects across building types, as building sale is likely to be more immediately disruptive for families in buildings with fewer residential units. We use these indicators as instruments following the logic that building sale might induce residential, and hence school, mobility, but because the student's family is a renter and not an owner, the sale will be unrelated to student performance except through its effect on mobility.

Heterogeneity in Medium-term Impacts: Structural and Nonstructural Moves

Parsing short-term and medium-term effects, data and measures.

We use richly detailed student-level administrative data from the NYCDOE for three cohorts of eighth grade students living in rental units (i.e., excluding students in single-family homes, condos, and cooperatives, who number slightly more than 23,000) and making standard academic progress (SAP) from first grade through middle school, allowing us to construct a complete school mobility history. These cohorts are defined as those students in eighth grade in academic years 2008– 17 We exclude those students who enter NYC public schools after first grade or exit before eighth grade because we are unable to observe mobility patterns or performance during years in which these students were not enrolled in NYC public schools. We focus our analysis on students in grades 5–8 in order to include information on building sale. Overall, the sample has more than 88,000 unique students (or about 29,000 students per cohort) attending roughly 1,044 different schools.

Student-level data include information on gender, race/ethnicity, nativity, poverty (measured as eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch or attendance in a universal free meal school), English proficiency, home language, receipt of special education services, residence borough, and performance on standardized ELA and math exams administered statewide in grades 3–8. Test scores are measured in z-scores, which are standardized to have a mean of zero and a standard deviation of 1 across all students for each grade–year combination. Each student has a unique identifier enabling us to follow him over time during his tenure in NYC public schools. These data also include information on the school attended at three points of the academic year (October, March, and June), allowing us to identify students changing schools in the summer (June to October) and during the academic year (October to March or March to June). We use this information to construct mobility measures.

For academic years 2005–10, NYCDOE data also contain student address information, which we link to information on building characteristics and property transactions to identify students living in rental units and construct our sale instruments. 18 We focus on renters for four reasons. First, we expect renters as a group to be more mobile and therefore we are particularly interested in the effects of school mobility on this population. Second, compared with students in owner-occupied housing, renters are disproportionately more likely to be poor (82 versus 56 percent), less likely to be white (13 versus 36 percent), and tend to be lower performing. Therefore, this is the group of students for whom mobility is most likely deleterious. Third, while the building sale instruments meet the exclusion restriction for students living in rental housing, they are almost certainly endogenous for students in owner-occupied units. Focusing on students in rental housing allows us to examine the impacts of unanticipated school mobility, which is understudied in the current literature. Finally, because the majority of NYC public school students (79.6 percent) are renters, this group provides insight about most of the public school student population in NYC. Our main analysis includes students living in any rental unit in year t , but we also estimate with two alternative samples: students who are always renters and excluding students in small (2–4 family) rental buildings where sale could be endogenous.

Descriptive Statistics

Despite popular notions of “typical” elementary school configurations, the timing of mandated moves actually varies significantly in NYC; there is simply no single standard grade span for elementary schools. Although the majority of students in our sample (63.5 percent) attended a K–5 school in first grade, a substantial fraction (19.1 percent) attended a K–6 school, 7.9 percent attended a K–8 school, and the remaining 9.5 percent of students attended a school with some other grade configuration. Taken from another perspective, 58.0 percent of the schools attended by first graders in our sample are K–5, 22.2 percent are K–6, 8.8 percent are K–8, and the remaining 11 percent of schools serve other grade spans. Therefore, although the vast majority of students will make at least one structural move before grade 8, there is variation in the timing of when such moves occur. Similarly, there is quite a bit of variation in when students enter middle school. For example, whereas 76.5 percent of students are zoned for a middle school that begins in sixth grade, 14 percent are zoned for a middle school that begins in fifth grade and another 9 percent are zoned for middle schools with other entry grades (see table A.2 in the online appendix). This variation in grade span is consistent with significant variation in both the timing and number of moves made by NYC public school students over the course of their schooling career. Furthermore, this variation is important for our identification strategy, which leverages these differences in grade configuration to predict student mobility.

Notes: Mobility history includes all moves made between grades 1—8. Summer moves are made between June and October. Mid-year moves are made between October and June. Poverty is defined by eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch, or attendance in a universal free meal school. Foreign-born students have birthplaces outside the United States. Graded special education students include those receiving full- or part-time services. Test scores are measured as z-scores (mean zero and standard deviation one for all tested students by grade and year).

Difference-in-Difference Results

Notes: Robust standard errors in parentheses. Post-summer move is equal to 1 in all years after a student moves schools between June and October. Post-summer move is equal to 1 in all years after a student moves schools between October and June. Summer moves made after the completion of a terminal grade are structural moves. Summer moves made after the completion of a non-terminal grade are nonstructural moves. All models include controls for poverty, English proficiency, home language, participation in special education services, grade, residence borough, and year. Models in columns (1) and (2) also control for gender, race, and prior test scores. Models in columns (3) through (6) include student fixed effects. Sample excludes students living in single family homes, condos, or coops in year t .

*** p < 0.01.

Disentangling structural and nonstructural moves (columns 5 and 6) suggests that there are likely heterogeneous medium-term effects of mobility: Students who make structural moves perform almost twice as poorly as students who make nonstructural moves, and this result is statistically significant. Even so, these results indicate that all else equal, both types of mobility have a negative relationship with student performance. As previously noted, however, there are reasons to believe these results do not fully account for the endogeneity of school mobility. We therefore turn to IV estimates, which are our preferred specification. In the results that follow, although we control for mid-year mobility, we do not report the results because no instruments suitable for the identification of this variable are available and we cannot interpret the coefficient estimates as causal. 21

What Predicts Mobility?

Before turning to the estimates from the IV models themselves, by examining results from the first stage model we first consider whether and to what extent our proposed instruments actually predict student mobility. If, as described in our conceptual framework, structural and nonstructural mobility are related, we should see evidence that grade span is a significant predictor of both types of moves.

Notes: Robust standard errors, clustered by first-grade school by cohort, in parentheses. Coefficients displayed are for the excluded instruments. Model also includes controls for poverty, English proficiency, participation in special education services, whether a student made a mid-year move, grade, residence borough, year, and student fixed effects.

** p < 0.05; *** p < 0.01.

Nonstructural moves are predicted by all sets of instruments (columns 2 and 4). For example, the probability that a student makes a nonstructural move decreases 1.6–1.7 percentage points at Terminal and increases with YearsPreMS , at a decreasing rate. That is, a child is less likely to make a nonstructural move the closer he is to the terminal grade of his elementary school and is more likely to make a nonstructural move if he has a longer time until he is eligible to attend his zoned middle school. Again, this is consistent with our intuition that parents are less likely to make a nonstructural move to a school where their child would be nearing the terminal grade (and have to make another move soon) and are more likely to make a nonstructural move if their child will not be eligible to attend the nearby middle school for multiple years. Finally, the probability of a nonstructural move increases 1.5–1.6 percentage points with sale of a 2–4 family building, which is consistent with renters experiencing unanticipated shocks when owners sell buildings.

Overall these estimates show that our three sets of instruments are significant predictors of both structural and nonstructural moves. Many coefficients are individually significant, and the F statistics are large (all greater than 20). We find similar results using other specifications of grade span and a more parsimonious set of instruments, excluding middle school entry grade. 22

* p < 0.1; *** p < 0.01.

Articulated versus Nonarticulated Moves

* p < 0.1; ** p < 0.05; *** p < 0.01.

Other Considerations and Robustness Tests

We explore the robustness of our results by controlling for school quality, trends in performance before moves, and alternatives to our renter sample. Results are qualitatively unchanged. The results from alternative specifications discussed below use the nonparametric grade span specifications as instruments for mobility, although results using the quadratic grade-span specification are qualitatively similar (see table A.6 in the online appendix). Further, although the results discussed below focus on structural and nonstructural moves, results regarding articulated and nonarticulated moves are similarly robust (see tables A.7 and A.8 in the online appendix).

School Quality

Prior performance.

Another potential concern is that our estimates may capture trends in student performance in the years leading up to a move. If, for example, movers perform worse in the year before they move, then the negative relationship between structural moves and performance could be an artifact of this pre-existing trend in performance. Thus, we augment our models with a series of indicators for one year prior to structural move and one year prior to nonstructural move, which will capture students’ performance in the year preceding a particular type of move. Our results (see table 7 , columns 3 and 6) are generally unchanged and, importantly, we see that students actually perform better or no differently in the year before a structural move (which is the opposite of what we would expect if our findings regarding the negative impact of structural moves were instead capturing pre-existing dips in student performance). Further, this does not appear to reflect a regression to the mean because when student performance is regressed on three years before and three years after a move there is a very obvious structural break in performance in the year of the move (see figures A.1 and A.2 in the online appendix). While nonstructural moves no longer appear to have a significant effect on ELA performance, the coefficient remains large and positive but imprecisely estimated. 25

Alternative Samples

Second, we exclude students living in small (2–4 family) rental buildings from our sample. The concern with including students in small rental buildings is that sale may, in fact, reflect the characteristics of tenants (see table 8 , columns 3, 4, 7, and 8). Again, sign and significance of most coefficients are largely unchanged—structural moves appear to have negative effects on both ELA and math performance in the medium term, with a significantly more negative impact on ELA in the year of the move, and nonstructural moves have no impact on performance in either subject. Consistent with other findings, however, coefficients are large and positive, but imprecisely estimated.

The vast majority of students in the United States change schools at least once before reaching ninth grade, and many move multiple times (GAO 2010 ). As policy makers and educators consider interventions addressing school mobility, it is critical to be aware of several factors: (1) the organization of schools induces student mobility; (2) there is a relationship between mandated articulation points and the timing of school moves; and (3) structural and nonstructural moves are related. Importantly, differences in the expected costs, benefits, and motivation of structural and nonstructural moves imply that the consequences for students are likely heterogeneous and disentangling these differences is essential in crafting effective policy.

In this paper, we use longitudinal data on NYC public elementary and middle school students to estimate the causal effects of heterogeneous school moves on student academic performance. Student fixed effects control for time-invariant differences between movers and non-movers, such as differences in ability and family circumstances. Following the logic that the grade span of a student's first-grade elementary and zoned middle schools shapes subsequent mobility, and changes in housing may induce school moves, we use instrumental variables based on the configuration of the first-grade school, zoned middle school, and building sales as instruments for school mobility among a sample of students in rental housing.

Our results are intuitively appealing. We find that the impact of school moves on academic performance is, indeed, heterogeneous. Structural moves have negative consequences in both the short and medium terms, while the impact of nonstructural moves is more ambiguous, producing no effects in the short term and either positive or no effects in the medium term. When we disaggregate nonstructural moves into articulated and nonarticulated moves, we find evidence to suggest that nonstructural moves made to start the destination school on time (and that are most likely to reflect strategic behavior) have positive effects. These results are robust to alternative specifications, instruments, and samples. Perhaps most importantly, we uncover what appear to be permanent effects of structural mobility that have gone unrecognized in previous literature.

These results raise questions about the efficacy of the policies followed by most U.S. districts that build structural moves into their school organizations. These structural moves have negative short-term and medium-term consequences, and systems that minimize them have the potential to increase performance. For example, moving to a system of all K–8 schools would eliminate structural mobility, which would increase performance. But a K–8 system also might have the unintended effect of increasing nonstructural mobility. In particular, if all schools were K–8 schools, then any student moving schools would make a nonarticulated, nonstructural move. Although our results regarding nonarticulated moves are not significant, many point estimates are large and negative (but imprecisely estimated). The net effect of shifting to a K–8 system is, then, unclear a priori and would depend on the increased numbers of nonstructural movers compared with the reduced numbers of structural movers. If students mostly remain in the K–8 school in which they first enroll, performance would likely improve. It should be noted, however, that the results presented here are based on a system where the majority of students do, in fact, make structural moves. Therefore, our ability to extrapolate results to a system of K–8 schools where the majority of students do not make structural moves is limited. It would be worth examining mobility in urban school districts with K–8 systems, such as Chicago, as well as the impacts of reforms, such as those in Philadelphia, that have attempted to change districts over to K–8 systems.

In the current system where districts often have a variety of grade spans, our results indicate that articulated, nonstructural moves, improve performance. Our estimates likely reflect the dominance of the strategic Tiebout-type moves, especially because we control for mid-year moves when many of the reactive moves likely occur. 26 Thus districts may want to provide information that helps parents understand differences across schools and encourage such moves.

Although the mobility and grade span literatures have remained largely separate, our work argues that they should be better integrated, and understanding the impact of mobility on academic performance requires recognizing the relationship between structural and nonstructural moves and between past and anticipated moves. Important directions for future research include more deeply probing underlying mechanisms of school mobility, including contemporaneous residential mobility, and exploring the externalities of mobility on nonmobile students. We look forward to the results of this work.

We thank Elizabeth Debraggio for invaluable research assistance; seminar participants at Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania, Wagner School-New York University, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and APPAM and AEFP annual meetings for helpful advice; and the Spencer Foundation for support for this research. All conclusions are the authors’ alone.

There is a wide variety of grade spans in NYC, including many where an elementary school is not perfectly aligned with a zoned middle school. A little over 35 percent of students in our sample attended a first-grade school whose terminal grade was not aligned with the zoned middle school's lowest grade (see table A.3 in the online appendix, which is available on the Education Finance and Policy Web site at www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/suppl/10.1162/EDFP_a_00198 ).

A large share of renters is also found in other large U.S. cities. For example, in the Miami metropolitan area 63 percent of family households are renters; in Los Angeles, it's 55 percent. These numbers understate the share of public school students in renter households if children of owner-occupants disproportionately attend private schools.

Specifically, they find that students who move within a district have lower gains in math achievement than students who change districts. Students who change districts, but stay within a geographic region, also have lower gains but the magnitude of the estimated effect is smaller.

There are, of course, many other forms of induced mobility: school closings, school reorganizations, student reclassifications into special education, student suspensions, program closings, and so forth, and many of these have a separate literature. These forms of induced mobility are far less common than the other forms of mobility that are the focus of this paper, however, thus we do not review them here.

The model we outline is primarily for expository purposes. There is extensive work in the school choice literature that examines the topic of how parents choose schools and whether they choose high-performing schools (see, e.g., Kleitz et al. 2000 ; Hastings and Weinstein 2008 ; Rich and Jennings 2015 ).

It should be noted that mobility is also likely to affect not only the mobile student but also his peers. Examining the spillover effects of mobile students on their nonmobile peers is beyond the scope of this paper but has been investigated by others (see, e.g., Whitesell, Stiefel, and Schwartz 2016 ).

Similarly, the benefits and costs of moving to a new school will depend upon the number of years until the next mandated structural move out of that school—that is, the number of years a student will be able to attend the new school until the next structural move mandated at that school. The shorter the time until an anticipated structural move in the next school, the shorter the period to amortize the cost of the move to the new school.

Although changes in housing are likely related to school moves, the focus of this particular analysis is on the impact of school mobility. We examine the impacts of residential mobility and concurrent residential and school moves in other work (see Cordes, Schwartz, and Stiefel 2017 and Cordes et al. 2016 ).

To eliminate concerns that building foreclosure or sale is related to characteristics of tenants in small rental buildings, we also perform a robustness test, including the exclusion of students who live in buildings that house two to four families (2–4 family buildings).

We can include both grade and year effects because we have multiple cohorts of students, each of which is in different grades in different years.

This comparison group of stable students includes not only those who never move, but also those who will move in the future but have not yet made a move.

Notice that our models include student fixed effects rather than lagged test scores. Similar results are obtained in a value-added specification.

Note that YearsPre, YearsPost, and Terminal are perfectly collinear within-student and so in models containing student fixed effects, we omit YearsPost.

Note that YearsToMS, YearsPostMS, and Entry are perfectly collinear within-student. Thus in models containing student fixed effects, we omit YearsPostMS.

For students making multiple structural or nonstructural moves, PostStruct and PostNonstruct take a value of 1 in the year of the first such move. This is a relatively small fraction of our sample, however, with only 4 percent of students making more than one structural move and 7 percent making more than one nonstructural move.

For students making multiple structural or nonstructural moves, Structural and NonStruct take a value of 1 in each of the years that the student makes such a move.

The SAP students are a particularly attractive group of students to study for at least three reasons. First, there is a long history of their mobility, with potential for heterogeneity in types of moves and for large numbers of moves, and consistent longitudinal data on their schools and performance. Second, SAP students remain in one school district (NYC), thus removing the possibility of confounding effects of policies, practices, and cultures that differ across districts. Third, SAP students exclude students who have experienced significant changes in their academic placements—such as classification into self-contained, full time (“ungraded”) special education programs—which might obscure the impact of mobility and complicate the interpretation of conclusions. The result is that SAP students are slightly higher achieving at any point in time than the cross section of NYC students which may mean that any estimated effects sizes are lower than would be found for other students. See online Appendix table A.1 for characteristics of other NYC students who are not included in the sample.

We define “owner occupied units” as all single-family homes, condos, and cooperatives. This is a conservative definition of “owner occupied,” as some families living in condos are renters. Without unit-level data, however, we are unable to separate owner-occupants from renter-occupants in condo buildings.

Note, all z-scores are above zero because the sample is restricted to those students who are continuously enrolled and making standard academic progress—a group that tends to be higher performing, on average. Therefore, we expect that any estimated effects sizes for this group are lower than would be found for other students.

Although direct comparisons with Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin ( 2004 ) are difficult because the outcome in their models is gain scores whereas our outcome is in levels, our results are of the same sign and similar magnitude to theirs, where they find a decrease in gain scores of between 0.024 and 0.088 SDs among within-district movers.

Although building sale was predictive of mid-year mobility in the first stage, the point estimates and the F of the excluded instruments were quite small and deemed insufficient for identification.

First-stage results from alternative grade span specifications and a more parsimonious set of instruments are available from authors upon request. Note that because there are only two endogenous variables in this model (structural and nonstructural moves), only two sources of exogenous variation are needed, thus including the third set is not required for estimation.

First-stage IV estimations for the results in table 5 are shown in tables A.4 (ELA) and A.5 (math) in the online appendix.

These are calculated as the school/grade fixed effect from a conventional education production function model estimated for the year prior. That is, for year t models we use the t − 1 school fixed effect.

Because the sample focuses on students in grades 5–8, we do not have enough years of data to include “trends” in our model. The estimates in online appendix figures A.1 and A.2 represent coefficient estimates from student fixed effects models estimated on our sample beginning in third grade.

Further, parents who wait until the summer to move their child are likely more strategic than those who move mid-year.

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Moving to a New School

This essay will discuss the challenges and opportunities of moving to a new school. It will cover topics such as adapting to a new environment, making friends, dealing with change, and embracing new educational opportunities. The piece will offer advice for students transitioning to a new school, focusing on the positive aspects of change. PapersOwl offers a variety of free essay examples on the topic of Child Care.

How it works

All my life I have lived in Texas and have moved now to 3 cities here. I was born and raised in Austin, Texas. After 4 years of living there I moved to Houston, Texas where I spent the majority of my life. After living there for 13 years I have now moved here to Tyler. Moving cities was always a scary thing and was a stressful thing for me. What I was mostly nervous about was me not knowing anyone that lived there.

Everything is different, the environment, vibe, and it is way smaller then what I am use to.

My family lived Houston, TX until April, 23, 2017 at approximately 2 o’clock. It took a long time for us to pack everything and just looking back at everything and thinking of all of the good memories. It was a heartbreaking thing to do. My parents told my young brother and I that we were moving to Tyler, TX. I had no idea where that was because I have never heard of that city before. I was excited about this new experience as well as afraid.

I have always wanted to travel to a place where I have never been before, it was an interesting thing to do. We finally packed up and put all of our last belongings in the big uhaul truck. We then checked again to make sure that we took everything and said our last goodbye’s The drive took about 5 hours and just passing out of Houston got me sick. The roads were narrow and were surrounded by forests. We finally arrived in Tyler, it was nothing like Houston I thought. I knew nobody, all I knew was that I lived in the middle of a small non urban city. It was small and did not have all those roads on top of each other. At first, I was nervous about moving into a new home. One thing that really made me unhappy was having to share a room with my younger brother. I had my own room and my own privacy for over 10 years and I was enjoying it until we moved here. My family went from living in a big house into living in a small apartment. We set up everything without much hassle.

For a while our apartment did not seem like our home. It seemed more like we were on vacation. Eventually August came around, that meant a new school year was starting. Except I wasn’t going to be returning to the same school. I used to go to a Early College High School in Houston and transferred over here. I didn’t even know what to think. I was nervous about coming to this school because I have to make new friends and it just changed my whole life style. Not only that but I did not know where to go shopping or who to hangout with when I am bored, also what to do when I am bored. After going to school for a while and getting to know everyone it was not as bad as I thought it would be. I eventually made friends and everyone was cool with me. I went out with them and they told me a lot about Tyler. Now living here for my second year I love living here and would not call anywhere else home.

But what about children? who will go to the new school?For example, I cannot say that I did not like the school I studied at. On the contrary, I loved her and everyone who was with me then. But my soul demanded a change, and I decided to leave for another educational institution after the ninth grade. This is a normal practice because after passing the exams, many leave: some go to college, some to stronger educational institutions.

I have already changed schools once. Then I gained new knowledge and opportunities. Therefore, the next transition did not scare me. In the new class, I made two close friends. And also my academic performance has improved significantly. In general, a new school is a new life! You never know what awaits you, but I believe that with the right attitude, there will be only good things ahead.

It’s easy to get accustomed to a new team if you choose people who are similar to you, who have the same interests, plans for life. Do not worry if one of your classmates does not accept you, just shut yourself off from him, not sorting out the relationship. If you don’t touch each other, then nothing bad will happen. “

Moving somewhere you have never been before is always a scary thing to do and no one ever wants to do it.  

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Essays About Moving to a New Place: Top 5 Examples and 5 Writing Prompts

Moving homes may seem daunting, no matter where you go. If you are writing essays about moving to a new place, you can use our guide to inspire you.

Almost all of us have experienced moving to a new place at least once. As hard as it is for some, it is simply a part of life. Frequently-given reasons for moving include financial difficulty or success, family issues, career opportunities, or just a change of scenery. 

Whether you are moving to a new house, village, city, or even country, it can seem scary at first. However, embracing a more positive outlook is crucial so as not to get burnt out. We should think about moving and all changes in our life as encouraging us to learn more and become better people. 

5 Essay Examples To Inspire Your Writing

1. finding a new house by ekrmaul haque, 2. first impressions by isabel hui, 3. reflections on moving by colleen quinn, 4.  downsizing and moving to the countryside two years on. what it’s really like and some tips if you’re thinking of upping sticks too by jessica rose williams.

• 5. ​​The Dos and Don’ts of Moving to a New City by Aoife Smith

1. How to Cope with Moving Homes

2. would you choose to move to a new place, 3. a dream location, 4. my experience moving to a new place, 5. moving homes alone vs. with your family.

“Sometimes it’s really hard to find a place that I like to live and a house that is suitable for me. This time I learn so many things that I can found a new house quickly. While finding a new house I was bit frustrated, however gaining new experience and working with new people was always fun for me. Finally I am happy, and I have started living peacefully in my new place.”

Haque writes about concerns he and many others have when looking for a new house to move into, including safety, cost, and accessibility. These concerns made it quite difficult for him to find a new place to move into; however, he was able to find a nice neighborhood with a place he could move into, one near school and work. You might also be interested in these articles about immigration .

“I didn’t want to come off as a try-hard, but I also didn’t want to be seen as a slob. Not only was it my first day of high school, but it was my first day of school in a new state; first impressions are everything, and it was imperative for me to impress the people who I would spend the next four years with. For the first time in my life, I thought about how convenient it would be to wear the horrendous matching plaid skirts that private schools enforce.”

Hui, whose essay was featured in the New York Times, writes about her anxiety on her first day of school after having moved to a new place. She wanted to make an excellent first impression with what she would wear; Hui coincidentally wore the same outfit as her teacher and could connect with her and share her anxiety and concern. She also gave a speech to the class introducing herself. This, Hui says, was an unforgettable experience that she would treasure. Check out these essays about home .

“In the end, I confess that I am a creature of habit and so moving is always a traumatic experience for me. I always wait until the last minute to start organizing, I always have stuff left over that I’m frantically dealing with on the last day, and I’m always much sadder about leaving than I am excited about my new adventure.”

In her essay, Quinn discusses her feelings when she moves houses: she is excited for the future yet mournful for what once was and all the memories associated with the old house. She takes pictures of her houses to remind her of her life there. She also grows so attached that she holds off on packing up until the last minute. However, she acknowledges that life goes on and is still excited for what comes next.

“Two years later and I’m sat writing this outside said cottage. The sun is filtering through the two giant trees that shade our house and the birds are singing as if they’re in a choir. I can confirm I’m happy and with hindsight I had nothing to worry about, though I do think my concerns were valid. So many of us dream of a different kind of life – a quieter, slower paced life surrounded by nature, yet one that still allows us to enjoy 21st century pleasures.

Williams reminisces about her anxiety when moving into a country cottage, a drastic change from her previous home. However, she has learned to love country living, and moving to a new place has made her happier. She discusses the joys of her new life, such as gardening, the scenic countryside, and peace and quiet. She enjoys her current house more than city living. 

5. ​​ The Dos and Don’ts of Moving to a New City by Aoife Smith

“​​But the primary element this ample free time has offered me is time to think about what truly makes an ideal, comfortable life, and what’s necessary for a positive living environment. Of course, the grass is always greener, but perhaps, this awakening has offered me an insight into what the grass needs to grow. It’s tough to hear, but all your bad habits will translate to your new culture so don’t expect to go ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ overnight.”

Smith gives tips on how to adjust to city life well. For example, he tells readers to stay in contact with friends and get out of their comfort zone while also saying not to buy a “too-small” apartment and get a remote job without face-to-face interaction. His tips, having come from someone who has experienced this personally, are perfect for those looking to move to a big city. 

5 Prompts for Essays About Moving to a New Place

Moving is challenging at first, but overcoming your fear and anxiety is essential. Based on research, personal experience, or both, come up with some tips on how to cope with moving to a new place; elaborate on these in your essay. Explain your tips adequately, and perhaps include some words of reassurance for readers that moving is a good thing. 

For a strong argumentative essay, write about whether you would prefer to stay in the home you live in now or to move somewhere else. Then, support your argument, including a discussion and rebuttal of the opposing viewpoint, and explain the benefits of your choice. 

Everyone has their own “dream house” of some sort. If you could, where would you move to, and why? It could be a real place or something based on a real place; describe it and explain what makes it so appealing to you. 

Almost all of us have experienced moving. In your essay, reflect on when you moved to a new place. How did you adjust? Do you miss your old house? Explain how this moving experience helped form you and be descriptive in your narration.  

Most people can attest that moving as a child or with one’s family is a much different experience from moving alone. Based on others; testimonials and anecdotes, compare and contrast these two experiences. To add an interesting perspective, you can also include which of the two you prefer.

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers .If you still need help, our guide to grammar and punctuation explains more.

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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Reflective Essay On Moving School

Moving schools is definitely a challenge for kids since it means they are forced to leave their comfort zone and find a new one. When I was about 9 years old my parents and I moved from Boise to Meridian. It wasn’t necessarily a big move since we still lived in Idaho, but it meant I had to change schools. It was difficult for me to do that since the old school I had been attending since kindergarten. Moving meant that I would have to leave my 4th grade class in Boise, to join a new one in Meridian. I was excited since it meant I was moving into a new house that was located in a neighborhood that was brand new.

The feeling of being somewhere new was weird at first, since it didn’t smell or look like home. We had to unpack all of our things and set up the tv and internet. The typical stuff people do when they first move in. Going to bed in a new room, new house was super strange for me. I felt like I belonged at my old place. Falling asleep on the first night didn’t happen too easy. When I woke up the next day, I had to get ready to go to school. It was my last day there, and I knew I had to make the best of it. I remember before I left, all my friends were hugging me and telling me not to forget about them.

I think that was the first and only time I had ever cried about leaving someone. It honestly wasn’t long after until more people started crying. Who knew a 4th grade class could get so emotional about a girl leaving? Anyway, that night was a Halloween party my school was hosting. They called it Trunk or Treat, which basically meant that a bunch of teachers and families would bring their car out, decorate them, dress up, and hand out candy. There were games being played, candy eaten, and everyone was wearing their best Halloween costume.

I had a few more hours to say goodbye to everyone before I made my way home to a new house in a new city. Well, maybe the city wasn’t so new since most people who live in Meridian refer to it as Boise. I know I say I live in Boise when someone outside of Idaho asks me what city I am from. Eventually I had to start my new day at a new school. The first day wasn’t so bad, I hung out with a few girls whose names I didn’t even learn until the next week. I’ll be honest though, I felt extremely out of place. Someone in that class referred to me as the “New Girl”.

It was strange being called that since all my years of going to school I was never “new”. I decided just to brush it off and continue on throughout the days. I tried keeping a positive outlook on this whole move thing, but the positivity slowly started disappearing as the days would go on. The group I had been with, started slowly to back away from me. They were treating me as if I was some sort of stranger who had happened to invade their personal lives. They wouldn’t save me seats at lunch, stopped including me in games, and would even act as though I wasn’t there sometimes.

I didn’t understand what was going on and at that time I was way too shy to confront them about it. I remember my parents telling me maybe those girls were jealous. Well, actually most of those girls were nice to me, there was just one who I kind of would get the impression of, that she didn’t want me there. My parents continued to tell me that only reason they could possibly not want me around was because they were jealous. I did go through this crazy phase in 4th grade through most of 7th where all I wanted to wear was Abercrombie and Fitch. th grade year I believe 80% of my wardrobe was Abercrombie.

My dad would tell me it was a possibility that one of the girls thought she had the prettiest outfits in the class and then when I came, she got upset. It was a typical thing a father would say to his young daughter to make her feel better. The rest of the school year I hated. I didn’t like the fact that my parents made us move. Moving meant change. Change was never a good thing for me because it meant I had to leave behind my old life and start a new one.

As months went by, I began thinking that I should make the remaining 3 months of school more positive. I started playing tetherball outside. I wasn’t super good at first but by the end of the year I got a lot better. It was obviously a good choice to make since playing tetherball made me not look like a loser standing alone outside. It wasn’t long after until summer came along. I didn’t have to be in that classroom filled with people who didn’t care about me, and I obviously didn’t care much for them either.

I was invisible to them, and the thing about being invisible is that no one gives a who about you and you’ve got no one to give a who about. In the end, I definitely overcame the whole not having any friends because when school started again in the fall, I met some girls that were really cool and the three of us had some interesting adventures in the 5th grade class. Anyways, what happened the previous year was history. Moving definitely was a big change for me, but in the end I grew as a person. Moving is never easy for a kid, but with patience and time you can always make a new place a home.

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70 years ago, school integration was a dream many believed could actually happen. It hasn't

Seventy years ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled separating children in schools by race was unconstitutional

WASHINGTON — Seventy years ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled separating children in schools by race was unconstitutional. On paper, that decision — the fabled Brown v. Board of Education, taught in most every American classroom — still stands.

But for decades, American schools have been re-segregating. The country is more diverse than it ever has been, with students more exposed to classmates from different backgrounds. Still, around 4 out of 10 Black and Hispanic students attend schools where almost every one of their classmates is another student of color.

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Students sue cuny law school over ban on commencement speakers, claiming move is anti-palestinian.

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Eight CUNY Law School students are suing the embattled institution claiming it violated federal censorship rules by nixing student-selected speakers, who have recently been anti-Israel, at commencement.

The left-leaning institution’s ban was imposed after graduate Fatima Mousa Mohammed gave a hate-filled speech last spring bashing Israel, “white supremacy” in America and the “fascist” NYPD.

The students’ suit, filed in Manhattan federal court, alleges the “repression” of free speech and “unlawful termination” of two customs for the publicly funded City University of New York’s law-school commencement: the student-elected speakers and the live-streaming and recording of the event. 

The plaintiffs allege that CUNY is censoring speech that supports “Palestinian freedom.”

This year’s CUNY Law graduation ceremony will be held May 23 at the Apollo theater in Harlem in Manhattan.

“CUNY Law has a long history of celebrating commencement with elected student speakers, who often highlight social justice causes and freedom movements,” said Sajia Hanif, a third-year student at CUNY Law and one of the plaintiffs, in a statement released by Muslimadvocates.org, the group that filed the suit.

“It’s outrageous that CUNY would rather erase that tradition and stifle free speech than allow students to speak and be heard at the event marking the culmination of their program,” Hanif said.

“The cancellation of student speakers only happened after Arab, Palestinian, and visibly Muslim women started speaking up for Palestinian freedom — clearly a targeted, discriminatory response aimed at preventing students from calling for an end to Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”

Another plaintiff, third-year Palestinian law student Nusayba Hammad, said the restriction on speech  “affects every graduating student at CUNY Law and sets a dangerous precedent not only for students who want to speak in support of Palestinians but for anyone at CUNY advocating for justice and freedom.”

The lawsuit lists CUNY Law School Dean Sudha Setty as a defendant along with CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodgriguez and the CUNY’s board of trustees, including chairman Bill Thompson.

The lawsuits claim pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel viewpoints have been targeted for censorship in violation of free-speech rights afforded under the First Amendment.

“The First Amendment roundly protects freedom of speech within public institutions like CUNY, irrespective of viewpoint, and subject only to very narrow limitations,” the lawsuit says.

“Its protections are especially critical in a setting like the law school, which is supposed to train students like Plaintiffs to engage critically with opposing and often charged viewpoints that abound in legal advocacy.”

A CUNY Law rep responded, “In accordance with University policy, CUNY School of Law does not comment on complaints or pending litigation.”

CUNY’s chancellor and board also declined comment on the litigation through a representative.

The lawsuit comes as numerous anti-Israel pro-Hamas demonstrations and even riots have recently occurred on college campuses — including Columbia University — where lawbreaking protesters were arrested for vandalizing and occupying an academic building.

Also, CUNY Law school’s faculty council and student government have passed resolutions in support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel, which critics claim smacks of antisemitism.

CUNY emphasized that it was important to hold graduation ceremonies without disruptions.

“Each year, more than 50,000 CUNY students proudly graduate at more than 25 commencement ceremonies, a tradition we look forward to continuing this year,” CUNY said in a general statement regarding commencement at its campuses.

“We are working with campus leaders to ensure students enjoy a send-off with their classmates, families and faculty that honors their hard work and achievements.”

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When Is the Best Time to Work Out?

It’s an age-old question. But a few recent studies have brought us closer to an answer.

By Alexander Nazaryan

What is the best time of day to exercise?

It’s a straightforward question with a frustrating number of answers, based on research results that can be downright contradictory.

The latest piece of evidence came last month from a group of Australian researchers, who argued that evening was the healthiest time to break a sweat, at least for those who are overweight. Their study looked at 30,000 middle-aged people with obesity and found that evening exercisers were 28 percent less likely to die of any cause than those who worked out in the morning or afternoon.

“We were surprised by the gap,” said Angelo Sabag, an exercise physiologist at the University of Sydney who led the study. The team expected to see a benefit from evening workouts, but “we didn’t think the risk reduction would be as pronounced as it was.”

So does that mean that evening swimmers and night runners had the right idea all along?

“It’s not settled,” said Juleen Zierath, a physiologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. “It’s an emerging area of research. We haven’t done all the experiments. We’re learning a lot every month.”

No single study can dictate when you should exercise. For many people, the choice comes down to fitness goals, work schedules and plain old preferences. That said, certain times of day may offer slight advantages, depending on what you hope to achieve.

The case for morning exercise

According to a 2022 study , morning exercise may be especially beneficial for heart health. It may also lead to better sleep .

And when it comes to weight loss, there have been good arguments made for morning workouts. Last year, a study published in the journal Obesity found that people who exercised between the hours of 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. had a lower body mass index than counterparts who exercised in the afternoon or at night, though it did not track them over time, unlike the Australian study, which followed participants for an average of eight years.

Of course, the biggest argument for morning exercise may be purely practical. “For a lot of people, the morning is more convenient,” said Shawn Youngstedt, an exercise science professor at Arizona State University. Even if rising early to work out can be challenging at first , morning exercise won’t get in the way of Zoom meetings, play dates or your latest Netflix binge.

The case for afternoon exercise

A few small studies suggest that the best workout time, at least for elite athletes, might be the least convenient for many of us.

Body temperature, which is lower in the morning but peaks in late afternoon, plays a role in athletic performance. Several recent small studies with competitive athletes suggest that lower body temperature reduces performance (though warm-ups exercises help counter that) and afternoon workouts help them play better and sleep longer .

If you have the luxury of ample time, one small New Zealand study found that it can help to nap first. As far as the rest of us are concerned, a Chinese study of 92,000 people found that the best time to exercise for your heart was between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m.

“The main difference is our population,” Dr. Sabag said. While his study was restricted to obese people, the Chinese study was not. “Individuals with obesity may be more sensitive to the time-of-day effects of exercise,” he said.

The case for evening exercise

This latest study may not settle the debate, but it certainly suggests that those struggling with obesity might benefit from a later workout.

Exercise makes insulin more effective at lowering blood sugar levels, which in turn fends off weight gain and Type 2 diabetes, a common and devastating consequence of obesity.

“In the evening, you are most insulin resistant,” Dr. Sabag said. “So if you can compensate for that natural change in insulin sensitivity by doing exercise,” he explained, you can lower your blood glucose levels, and thus help keep diabetes and cardiovascular disease at bay.

One persistent concern about evening exercise is that vigorous activity can disturb sleep. However, some experts have argued that these concerns have been overstated.

The case that it may not matter

While many of these studies are fascinating, none of them is definitive. For one thing, most are simply showing a correlation between exercise times and health benefits, not identifying them as the cause.

“The definitive study would be to actually randomize people to different times,” Dr. Youngstedt said, which would be phenomenally expensive and difficult for academics.

One thing public health experts do agree on is that most Americans are far too sedentary. And that any movement is good movement.

“Whenever you can exercise,” Dr. Sabag urged. “That is the answer.”

In a recent edition of his newsletter that discussed the Australian study, Arnold Schwarzenegger — bodybuilder, actor, former governor — seemed to agree. He cited a 2023 study suggesting that there really isn’t any difference in outcomes based on which time of day you exercise. In which case, it’s all about what works best for you.

“I will continue to train in the morning,” the former Mr. Universe wrote. “It’s automatic for me.”

Alexander Nazaryan is a science and culture writer who prefers to run in the early evening.

Let Us Help You Pick Your Next Workout

Looking for a new way to get moving we have plenty of options..

To get the most out of your strength training, you need to let go of routine and try progressive overload .

What is the best time of day to exercise? A few recent studies have brought us closer to an answer .

Sprinting, at least for short distances, can be a great way to level up your workout routine .

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Is your workout really working for you? Take our quiz to find out .

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A comfortable sports bra can improve your overall workout experience. These are the best on the market .

Few things are more annoying than ill-fitting, hard-to-use headphones. Here are the best ones for the gym  and for runners .

Education and Schools in Moscow

This guide was written prior to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and is therefore not reflective of the current situation. Travel to Russia is currently not advisable due to the area's volatile political situation.

Despite much debate over the education system in Russia, the country has a high literacy rate. The quality of schooling has improved greatly over time, though it is still far from perfect.

There are public, private and international school options for children of school-going age in Moscow. Most expats choose to send their children to international schools. Expat parents often find that the teaching language and the method of instruction in public and private schools are not ideal for non-Russian children.

Entry requirements into schools may differ, so expats are encouraged to contact the schools directly for more information. In general, expats must provide their visa, the child’s birth certificate and any academic records.

The school year in Moscow follows the Northern Hemisphere pattern, with the longest break being in the summer months. The school week is generally Monday to Friday, from 8am or 9am to 2pm or 3pm.

Generally, there are three stages of schooling: primary school with Grades 1 to 4; basic secondary school from Grades 5 through 9; and upper secondary school which goes up to Grade 12.

Public schools in Moscow

Public school education is free to both Russian and foreign citizens. Parents only pay for meals and school uniforms.

The quality of state schools is debatable, and classrooms tend to have many students. The language of instruction in state schools is mainly Russian. This means, especially for older students who do not speak Russian, this option is often not feasible.

Private schools in Moscow

Private schools are less common than state schools. They provide the same Russian curriculum and teach mainly in Russian, but class sizes are smaller. Private schools are not free but are less expensive than international schools. Due to the language barrier, however, the options for expat education in Moscow remain mostly limited to international schools.

International schools in Moscow

Most international schools in Moscow are expensive. Curriculum models range from those that follow American or British teaching systems to ones that combine the Russian curriculum with international curricula. Alternatively, some offer the International Baccalaureate. There are several English-language schools to choose from, as well as schools teaching the German, French and Indian curricula.

Demand for the most prestigious schools can be high, and long waiting lists are to be expected. For this reason, expat parents moving to Moscow should attempt to enrol their children as early as possible.

Special-needs education in Moscow

There are limited schooling options for children with disabilities in Moscow. That said, efforts to develop the school system for those with disabilities are being made to avoid excluding these children. International schools are aiming to improve the possible support they could give. Some schools provide interventions including learning support, occupational therapy and speech programmes to enable students with mild to moderate learning disabilities to continue their education.

Homeschooling in Moscow

Homeschooling is becoming more and more common in Moscow, especially in comparison to the rest of the country. Expat parents must follow certain regulations. One such regulation is that they must enrol their child into a licensed school which acts as a supervising body. In some cases, homeschooled children can get access to resource provisions such as books. The school can also act as the exam centre when children must write formal exams.

Tutors in Moscow

Being such a large city, Moscow has many options for finding tutors. Expat parents will find various online platforms and portals through which they can hire a tutor for their child in Moscow. Tutors will be extremely helpful in assisting expat children with learning Russian, adjusting to their new school environment and curriculum, and getting up to speed in classes.

Further reading

►For a list of schools in Moscow for expats, see  International Schools in Moscow

►For a more in-depth description of the different schooling options available, see Education and Schools in Russia

Expat Interviews "My kids go to the French school. Our experiences have been mixed there. But overall it has met our needs (and price)." Read what Amanda has to say on her children settling into Moscow from her interview .

Are you an expat living in Moscow?

Expat Arrivals is looking for locals to contribute to this guide, and answer forum questions from others planning their move to Moscow. Please contact us if you'd like to contribute.

Expat Health Insurance

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Moving Internationally?

International Movers. Get Quotes. Compare Prices. Sirelo has a network of more than 500 international removal companies that can move your furniture and possessions to your new home. By filling in a form, you’ll get up to 5 quotes from recommended movers. This service is free of charge and will help you select an international moving company that suits your needs and budget. Get your free no-obligation quotes from select removal companies now!

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A Virginia county board votes to restore Confederates' names to schools

Bill Chappell

Mountain View High School will soon be known by its former name: Stonewall Jackson High School. The Shenandoah County School Board voted 5-1 to once again honor the Confederate general, whose name was originally attached to the school during the battle over racial segregation. Google Maps/Screenshot by NPR hide caption

Mountain View High School will soon be known by its former name: Stonewall Jackson High School. The Shenandoah County School Board voted 5-1 to once again honor the Confederate general, whose name was originally attached to the school during the battle over racial segregation.

The Shenandoah County School Board in Virginia will restore the names of Confederate generals Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Turner Ashby to two local schools. The controversial reversal comes nearly four years after the names were changed.

Mountain View High School will revert to its former name, Stonewall Jackson High School, and Honey Run Elementary School will go back to being Ashby-Lee Elementary School.

The board approved the change by a 5-1 vote, with supporters saying the Confederate figures' names had been taken off the schools in 2020 in a "knee-jerk" reaction amid protests of George Floyd's murder by police. But opponents — including some current students — warned the board that the Confederate names would brand the schools and their county as a haven for backward, racist thinking.

Debate over changing the name began last month. As member station WMRA reports, it was the second attempt to restore the names, after a failed try in 2022.

At the contentious and lengthy meeting saw, advocates from both sides drew raucous cheers and ovations from their supporters. The public session started around 7 p.m. ET Thursday and stretched into the early hours of Friday.

Here's what the students said

A handful of students attended the meeting, including several who said the current names represent inclusion and progress and should be kept.

"School board minutes from 1959 reveal that the decision to name our school after Stonewall Jackson was a product of massive resistance," said student Pria Dua, referring to an era when Virginia's leaders were aggressively fighting attempts to racially integrate the state's schools.

Like some of the other students who spoke, Dua attends classes at Mountain View High School as part of her curriculum at the Massanutten Regional Governor's School (a program that draws students from several school systems).

"I acknowledge that the community has been left divided and unhappy over the initial name change," Dua said. But, she asked the board, "By taking this step backward in 2024, what foot are we putting forward? What legacy are you leaving behind for my generation to inherit?"

Another student, Eden Shelhamer, criticized the board for investing time and energy into what she called a "clearly divisive argument" at the expense of important issues, while also seeming to refuse to consider students' opinions.

Live Updates: Protests For Racial Justice

Virginia governor calls for renaming schools that honor confederate leaders.

"The fact that this discussion is receiving a disproportionately vast amount of attention from the county deeply disappoints me," she said, "and leads me to wonder whether we are operating in the interests of our students or the preservation of our parents' pride."

Aliyah Ogle, a Black eighth grader and athlete who plays three sports for Mountain View High School, spoke about the possibility of having to compete under Stonewall Jackson's name.

"I would have to represent a man that fought for my ancestors to be slaves," she said, adding that she would feel as if she's being disrespectful both to her ancestors and her family's values.

"It is your job to make our schools a place where all students are valued and respected," Ogle said. She later added, "If this board decides to restore the names, I would not feel like I was valued and respected and you would not be doing your job."

Dropping the name of a Confederate leader, Fort Bragg is becoming Fort Liberty

Other students spoke in favor of changing the schools' names.

"My last name goes back six generations of conservative farmers in this county," senior Trey Heishman said, adding that his family — and he himself — have paid their taxes.

Heishman said he is poised to graduate from Mountain View — but, he added, "I'm hoping that my fellow friends who are juniors at the school can see that the name has been changed and that they can graduate under SJHS."

Carter Heishman, an eighth grader who is an athlete and a member of Future Farmers of America, also asked the board to restore the Stonewall Jackson name.

"I would like to wear a name that I'm proud of," he said. "Not only do I want to have my FFA jacket say Stonewall as I enter high school, but I would also love to have my jerseys — which I wear all year round — say Stonewall."

Invoking a long and complicated history

Residents speaking in favor of reverting to the Confederate names included Stuart Didawick, who noted that his family's roots run deep in the community, where his ancestors received land grants in the decades before the American Revolution.

"When you vote on the name restorations, will you listen to the opinions of woke outsiders who have for the most part no ties to the land, the history, or the culture of this county?" Didawick asked the board members. "Or will you listen to the voices of the people who elected you to represent them, the people whose families built and have sustained this county for generations?"

Judge allows the removal of a Confederate memorial at Arlington Cemetery

"We are the majority," Didawick said, "that's the way government works."

He added, "This board has a moral and ethical obligation to the citizens you represent to undo the dirtiest, most underhanded political stunt in the history of Shenandoah County politics."

But another citizen who spoke up was Stephanie Bullock Smith, a Black woman who graduated from Stonewall Jackson High School in 1983. It's time to move on, she told the board.

"Please do not go back in history," she said. "We don't need that. Our children don't need that either."

50 Years Of NPR

Confederate names on schools are flashpoints. here's one community's story, the board speaks.

Several board members who supported reverting the names back to their Confederate eponyms said that in the debate over the legacy of slavery and racism, critics have seemingly ignored school buildings that still bear the names of historic figures who owned enslaved people — including the namesake of Peter Muhlenberg Middle School, where Thursday's meeting convened.

"So I think all of this was politically driven," board member Michael Rickard said.

Confederate monument melted down to create new, more inclusive public art

Board members said they've received hundreds of emails from constituents about the names. Rickard held up a stack of what he said were around 260 emails.

"I had 118 of you vote to keep the names the way they are," he said. "But I had 144 of you ask to restore the names."

Kyle Gutshall, the board's vice chairman who also attends James Madison University, was the only member to vote against restoring the Confederate names.

America Reckons With Racial Injustice

Virginia military institute removes statue of confederate gen. 'stonewall' jackson.

The naming question, he said, is "clearly a very difficult and divisive matter that we've been on now for 2 to 4 years."

"Things like this really come down to perspective and, and how you view things," he said.

"Two years ago when I voted to change the name back, the outcome and the feedback that I received was quite different," Gutshall said. But, he added, as time has gone on, it seems some of his constituents no longer care as strongly about the issue.

"Ultimately, for me, it's a very tough decision," he said, describing efforts to get public feedback. While he has his own beliefs on the matter, Gutshall said that his district "has been overwhelmingly in support of retaining the names the way they are."

Ukraine war latest: Zelenskyy cancels foreign trips as official sounds alarm from border town under attack

The Ukrainian president has cancelled visits to Spain and Portugal after Moscow's forces began a new offensive in the northeast of the country, where Kyiv says it is moving troops to new positions. Submit your question on the war for our experts to answer in the box below.

Wednesday 15 May 2024 11:17, UK

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• Zelenskyy postpones all foreign visits due to 'situation in Kharkiv'
• Situation in Kharkiv town under Russian attack 'extremely difficult'
• Ukrainian troops move into new positions in Kharkiv
• Russia downs missiles launched at Crimea
• Analysis:  Putin's 'baffling' reshuffle explained
• Live reporting by Lauren Russell

Ask a question or make a comment

This morning we reported on a Ukrainian drone attack on an oil depot and power substation in Russia's Belgorod and Lipetsk regions.

Responding to the attacks, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said they were a demonstration of the "criminality" of Kyiv and the Western powers which back it.

She said all those responsible for the attacks will be punished.

The attack on the Oskolneftesnab oil depot near the city of Staryi Oskol and Yeletskaya power substation was conducted by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), a Ukrainian intelligence source said.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has postponed all foreign visits due to the situation in the Kharviv region, his press secretary has said.

Sergii Nykyforov said on Facebook that the Ukrainian leader instructed that "all international events scheduled for the coming days be postponed and new dates coordinated".

Earlier today Mr Zelenskyy cancelled trips to Spain and Portugal, but did not give a specific reason as to why.

Moscow began a pressing offensive on the Kharkiv region on Friday, after weeks of speculation that it was preparing to establish a new frontline there, and is forcing Ukraine to rush in reinforcements.

Ukraine is today planning to record high electricity imports after significant damage to its energy infrastructure from recent Russian strikes.

The energy ministry said imports were expected to rise to 23,692 megawatt hours (Mwh) up from of 21,072 Mwh on Tuesday and 19,484 Mwh on Monday.

The "emergency supplies" will come from Poland, Romania and Slovakia, as well as emergency assistance, the ministry said.

It warned that there could still be power shortages this evening. 

Ukraine's national grid operator said the import volumes would be close to the maximum that the country is technically able to receive from the EU.

Russian missile and drone attacks have caused more than $1bn (£792m) of damage to Ukraine's energy sector and a loss of 8,000 Mwh of generating capacity, energy minister German Galushchenko previously said.

Many regions have been experiencing blackouts as a result. 

US secretary of state Antony Blinken is in Kyiv meeting Ukrainian leaders.

Yesterday he also found time for an impromptu visit to a local nightclub where he took to the stage with an electric guitar to perform a version of Neil Young's 1989 hit Rockin' In The Free World. 

Before he began playing, he told the crowd: "The US is with you, so much of the world is with you."

For rights reasons, unfortunately, we can't show you him singing, but we can report he made a solid effort.

Russia's foreign ministry spokeswoman has said Moscow will destroy all US military equipment supplied to Ukraine.

Maria Zakharova's comments come after US secretary of state Antony Blinken told Ukrainian leaders in Kyiv that despite a month-long delay more US weaponry was coming and some had already arrived.

The US-aid package sets aside $61bn (£48.1bn) for Ukraine, much of which will go toward replenishing badly depleted artillery and air defence systems.

Ms Zakharova also took aim at attempts from the West to use frozen Russian assets to benefit Ukraine.

She said to do so would be in violation of Russian law and risked undermining the international financial system. 

If Russian assets in the US were seized, it could mean another $5bn (£3.9bn)  in assistance for Ukraine, coming from Russian Central Bank holdings.

However it is unlikely the US will seize the assets without agreement from other members of the G7 and the European Union.

The head of the Ukrainian police force in the Kharkiv region has described the situation in the town of Vovchansk as "extremely difficult". 

Oleksiy Kharkivskiy, Vovchansk's patrol police chief, said on Facebook that Russian forces are establishing positions inside the town. 

Yesterday Russia claimed it had taken parts of Vovchansk and the border village of Buhruvatka.

It is part of Moscow's pressing offensive on the Kharkiv region, which began on Friday after weeks of speculation that Russia was preparing to establish a new frontline there, and is forcing Ukraine to rush in reinforcements.

Russia has said it repelled a Ukrainian drone attack on the region of Tatarstan - around 497 miles east of Moscow.

The defence ministry said the attack occurred at around 7.30am local time.

It said Russian air defences had destoyed an aeroplane-style drone.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has cancelled a trip to Spain and Portugal, with some media outlets reporting it is because of renewed fighting in Ukraine.

King Felipe of Spain was due to hold a reception for Mr Zelenskyy on Friday. 

The Ukrainian leader was then expected to sign a bilateral security cooperation agreement with Portugal's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

A spokesperson for the Portuguese government said Mr Zelenskyy had cancelled the visit but did not give a reason, while the Spanish government said it could not comment for security reasons. 

As we have been reporting, Ukrainian troops remain outgunned by Russian forces.

Yesterday, the western and northern parts of Vovchansk in Ukraine's Kharkhiv region fell under the control of Russian forces, according to the TASS state news agency.

Emergency teams have been working at the scene of a Russian airstrike in Kharkiv.

The region is where Russian forces are pressing on with an offensive, forcing Ukraine to rush in reinforcements.

Apart from the devastation and the blow to Ukrainian morale in the region, home to Ukraine's second largest city of Kharkiv, the incursion is a distraction for Kyiv's defensive operations in the east where Russia has focused its offensive for months.

Fires at an oil depot and power substation in Russia's Belgorod and Lipetsk regions were caused by drones launched by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), a Ukrainian intelligence source has told Reuters.

The attack damaged Oskolneftesnab oil depot near the city of Staryi Oskol in Russia's Belgorod region and Yeletskaya power substation in the Lipetsk region.

"Russian industry which works to wage war with Ukraine will remain a legitimate target for the SBU," the intelligence source said.

"Measures to undermine the enemy's military potential will continue."

For context : Ukraine has been stepping up its strikes on oil and gas facilities across Russia in an effort to disrupt military logistics and combat operations - it is these facilities that supply fuel for Russian tanks, ships and fighter jets.

Experts also say that striking these sites will most likely cause disruption to Russia's energy network.

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Here are the 2024 winners of EJI's Montgomery Public Schools Legacy Scholarship

For the second year, the Equal Justice Initiative has awarded $10,000 to students at Montgomery Public Schools to help 34 students go to college.

The Montgomery Public Schools Legacy Scholarship was awarded to graduating seniors from each of the nine Montgomery public high schools, the nonprofit said. EJI selected the winners based on essays about EJI's legacy sites in Montgomery.

“We are incredibly excited to support these extraordinary young people who have distinguished themselves at their schools," said Bryan Stevenson, EJI's director. "Area students need to be supported, encouraged and affirmed when they work hard and strive to achieve greatness as these beautiful high school students have done. Providing scholarships to MPS students and their families has been a joyous and uplifting experience for us and look forward to continuing our work with area youth."

The organization's goal is to help students who have overcome obstacles and demonstrated a commitment to their communities.

The 34 winners of the Montgomery Public Schools Legacy Scholarship are:

• Alange Matthews, Percy Julian
• Azari Rudolph, Percy Julian
• Brianna Mack, Johnson Abernathy Graetz
• Christian Philemy, Park Crossing
• Christopher Robinson, McIntyre
• Daryl Ramon Thomas Jr., Booker T. Washington
• Elva Shao, Loveless Academic Magnet Program
• I’nthia Poole, Percy Julian
• Ingrid Dominguez, Carver
• Isabella Dennison, Booker T. Washington
• Izaiah Sledge, Lanier
• Jada Timmons, Brew Tech
• Jade Ray, Brew Tech
• Jailyn Dixon, Loveless Academic Magnet Program
• Jonathan Davis, Brew Tech
• Kathlyn Morrison, Lanier
• Kenzie Moore, Brew Tech
• Laken Burden, Park Crossing
• LilJessie Robinson, McIntyre
• Madison Thompson, Booker T. Washington
• Makayla McQueen, Park Crossing
• Maliah London, Carver
• Maya Brooks Tyynismaa, Booker T. Washington
• Maya Hall, Carver
• Mia Dunlap, Loveless Academic Magnet Program
• Mikeria Jones, Park Crossing
• Nadia Surles, Carver
• Naomi Patterson, Loveless Academic Magnet Program
• Neina Morrison, Lanier
• Sayyied Rida, Johnson Abernathy Graetz
• Summer Easterling, Lanier
• Teniyah Watkins, Johnson Abernathy Graetz
• Traykhemish Lee, Johnson Abernathy Graetz
• Yakira Chaney, Percy Julian

More: Last Year's Winners Meet the 19 MPS students awarded the Equal Justice Initiative's Legacy Scholarship

Alex Gladden is the Montgomery Advertiser's public safety reporter. She can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @gladlyalex.