Bob Barrett

Students in the western Florida Panhandle who get sent to see their school’s resource officer may get more than a meeting. They may get a snack. The School Resource Officer Food Program is the brainchild of Manna Food Pantries, a local food bank in Pensacola. Today, we’ll talk to the food bank's director about the program.

For most families, paying for college takes a ton of planning, saving, and understanding terms you’ve never heard before, or will ever hear again.In a recent survey by The Princeton Review, 82% of students said financial aid would be "very" or "extremely" necessary to pay for college, and nearly all respondents, a whopping 98%, said they would need some form of aid to fund the cost of the degree. The good news is that yes, there are grants and scholarships, and loans out there to help. The bad news is finding them can be quite a chore. That’s why we invited Kalman Chany on the show. He is the lead author for an annual guide published by the Princeton review called “Paying for College – Everything you Need to Maximize Financial Aid and Afford College." Chany is the founder and president of Campus Consultants Inc., a Manhattan-based firm that has guided thousands of parents and students through the financial aid process since 1984.

When talking about the civil rights movement in the south, the name Emmett Till is bound to come up. His murder is widely remembered today as one of the most brutal lynchings ever in the US. But while Till’s death terrorized young African-Americans in Mississippi, it also gave them a rallying cry. That’s the story that Robert H. Mayer tells in his new book “In the Name of Emmett Till: How the Children of the Mississippi Freedom Struggle showed us Tomorrow."

We’ve all seen them. Aging, deserted strip malls and retail shops are not only pretty ugly but are also taking up valuable real estate that could be put to better use. Finding those better uses is a topic that Ellen Dunham-Jones knows very well. She has been speaking and writing about suburban life and design for years. Today on The Best of Our Knowledge, we'll hear her ideas and some examples of retrofitting suburbia.

When talking about LGBTQ young people, the “B” often gets overlooked, but bisexual students do exist, and they have compelling stories to tell.Today on the Best of Our Knowledge, we’ll hear about some of those stories from a new book.

This week, when you first take a look at it, the issue of measuring student learning appears to be an educational problem: what and how much do students actually learn? But when you investigate the educational accountability movement, especially here in the U.S., you realize that the preoccupation with measuring student learning is a problem that goes much deeper.

For the 30th year, the Princeton Review has again listed what they feel are the best colleges in the country, and this year added a new batch of lists. Today on the Best of Our Knowledge, we’ll hear how this new college guide was put together.

This week, we discuss the heart with author Bill Schutt.

This week, we'll hear an archival interview with James Lowen from 2018.

Today on the Best of Our Knowledge, we’ll explore the digitization of libraries.