Lesley Cosme Torres
Education ReporterLesley Cosme Torres is an Education Reporter at Connecticut Public. She reports on education inequities across the state and also focuses on Connecticut's Hispanic and Latino residents, with a particular focus on the Puerto Rican community. Her coverage spans from LGBTQ+ discrimination in K-12 schools, book ban attempts across CT, student mental health concerns, and more. She reports out of Fairfield county and Hartford.
Prior to her current position, Lesley was a Spanish misinformation reporter for the Miami Herald where she focused on misinformation targeting Latino communities.
She received her master's degree in journalism from UC Berkeley with an emphasis on investigative reporting and covering Latino communities in the U.S. Lesley earned her undergraduate degree at Penn State University where she was a reporter for the Centre Daily Times and the Daily Collegian.
Her reporting has appeared on NPR's All Things Considered, WLRN, and KQED.
Lesley can be reached at ltorres@ctpublic.org.
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The report highlights the extreme need for affordable early childhood care. It found that the lack of affordable childcare has negatively affected parents by causing them to frequently miss work or quit their jobs. -
Buttigieg is a former teacher and is passionate about LGBTQ+ inclusive education. He hopes his memoir will give students who are not queer the opportunity to learn and empathize with stories different from their own. -
State Sen. Tony Hwang says the first step to addressing mental health is to remove the stigmas surrounding it. -
Students do not need to be enrolled at a specific school or sign-in to get the meals. The only requirement is that students are under 18 and eat their meals on-site. -
Some parents say they are upset they were never told the video would be shown to their kids. School leaders say the video was not intended to alienate students. -
The budget also contains over $240 million for Connecticut public K-12 schools for the 2024-25 school year. -
The state Senate is set to vote this week on Multilingual Learners Bill of Rights which would mandate school translation services for non-English speaking families. -
The Board of Education's (BOE) decision to not ban two books from the Newtown High School library comes one day after the resignation of Republican BOE members Janet Kuzma and Jennifer Larkin. -
The books in question are "Flamer" by Mike Curato and "Blankets" by Craig Thompson. Both address gender identity and sexuality. Those who oppose the books say the novels are overly graphic and should be removed. -
Dr. Nunez began her presidency in 2006 and will support the university as it transitions to new leadership.
