Kaiser Permanente Washington has awarded a total of $3.4 million in grants to school districts in Western Washington. The money is aimed at helping districts with a high concentration of poverty address mental health challenges among students.

Natalie Gomez has a pretty good excuse for missing this week’s AP biology test. She’ll be in Dharamsala, India, for a meeting with the Dalai Lama. The 16-year-old Bonney Lake resident is flying to India with five other high school students from Washington as part of the Compassion 2020 program , organized by Lt. Gov. Cyrus Habib and the state service organization, Association of Washington Generals.

A first-time candidate is giving a longtime Tacoma School Board director a run for her money, with the backing of the statewide teacher’s union.

When Cante Remle, 12, went to Licton Springs Park recently with a group of other young Native people to make a film about the traditional Duwamish site in North Seattle, what he discovered made him sad. “A lot of trees were vandalized, surprisingly. And a lot of trash was left around in corners, and in the river, there was a lot of shopping carts,” said Remle, who is Hunkpapa Lakota and Paiute. “I don’t know what type of people would shove shopping carts into a river, especially on a sacred site

It's been 10 years since a Swedish developer created Minecraft, and the video game has since become a global cultural phenomenon. Kids adorn their rooms with creeper and zombie pigman toys and head to school with tiny plastic pickaxes dangling from their backpacks. Adults have spent countless hours building a Minecraft version of the kingdoms of Westeros from the Game of Thrones series.

A month and a half into the school year, the state’s largest district continues to face criticism about food shortages and the kinds of food being served to students.

For parents in the Pacific Northwest, one constant fear is how safe their children will be at school if an earthquake strikes. Now, children at one school in the Stanwood-Camano School District will get warning ahead of time to take cover before the most intense shaking begins.

Seattle Children's Hospital has opened a new 540,000-square-foot facility in downtown Seattle as it expands research into possible cures for childhood diseases. The building will house research scientists and pediatricians working on a range of therapies. Dr. Jeff Sperring, chief executive of Seattle Children's, said the hospital right now employs about 2,000 people in its research institute and the hope is to add about 1,000 more over the next five to seven years.

A new report shows that a high percentage of foster children in Washington live with providers who are not paid by the state, and that can place a burden on those families.

Two teenage boys are among the people who died from opioid overdoses in recent weeks in King County. One attended Ballard High School in Seattle and another attended Skyline High School in Sammamish. Skyline High School previously lost another student to an overdose death in August.