Chris Kobara stood in front of an electronic white board in his New York City high school, practicing with a swoop of his pen the connection between the “a” and “r” in his name.

He stepped back and looked at the board with Suzanne Finman, his English teacher, who had been coaching him.

“If it’s readable, it’s something,” he said, displeased with his effort.

Mr. Kobara, 18, was one of six students who gathered after school in Ms. Finman’s classroom at the Urban Assembly Early College High School of Emergency Medicine on a recent afternoon to practice signing their names in cursive.

The students, all of them high school seniors, filled sheets with their names, at times comparing the flourishes they added to their letters.

The club is one of several that have been established in recent years at schools and libraries across the country where children are learning cursive in extracurricular clubs.

Cursive was eliminated from the Common Core standards in 2010, and now many children can’t sign their names, write checks or read historical documents written in cursive, such as the Declaration of Independence.

In a 2016 interview with Education Week, Sue Pimentel, who helped shape the Common Core state standards for English and language arts, said a higher priority had been placed on students learning how to use technology than learning cursive.

While some states have restored cursive writing to their curriculums, some students in states where it remains excluded have sought ways to learn the skill outside school.

“Knowing how to write your name in script is really important,” Mr. Kobara said. “Everybody should know how to write in script.”

He’s been practicing his signature for several weeks after school, perfecting a loop in the “C” of his first name, and plans to write thank you notes to teachers in cursive.

It started with the students’ curiosity.

“When students see me take my own notes in cursive, they immediately ask me to write their name in cursive and then they ask me to teach it to them,” Ms. Finman said. “This has happened a lot over the years, so I asked, ‘Could I teach you this in a cursive club?’”

While some students are learning in extracurricular clubs at school, others are finding their penmanship lessons at libraries.

Mandi Whipple, a librarian who specializes in young adult books at the public library in Blackstone, Mass., was inspired to start a cursive club last year after one of her colleagues observed that her grandchildren couldn’t read cursive writing.

Now, a group of students meets at the library for an hour every Thursday to practice the looping script of their letters.

“The ones that have stuck with it are now writing full sentences,’ Miss Whipple said. “They’re really into it.”

A cursive program at Abington Community Library in Clarks Summit, Pa., has a defined curriculum that children follow for eight weeks, focusing on a few letters each week.

“We show them how to do it and they can copy us on paper,” Leigh-Ann Puchalski, the children’s librarian said. “Then we do practice where they practice on worksheets. Then, to make it fun, we add different types of sensory elements.”

The children can trace letters in salt with their fingers, use magnetized drawing boards called Magna Doodles, and write in gel pens to make it fun, Mrs. Puchalski said.

The program has been so popular that it has had a wait-list, she said.

With the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence this year, Mrs. Puchalski is emphasizing the historical side of cursive and having children trace the Constitution.

“For one of the sessions we’ll use parchment paper,” Mrs. Puchalski said. “I did actually order the refillable fountain pens.”

In Pennsylvania, cursive won’t be a relic of the past much longer. Gov. Josh Shapiro signed a bill in February to reintroduce it in schools, joining at least 23 other states that have started to require that it be taught in schools. New Jersey is reintroducing cursive for the 2026-27 school year. Idaho brought it back last year.

Cursive is not just for signing checks. It also has a scientific advantage.

“When you form those intricate letters, those motor patterns on paper, it actually requires much more of the brain, and the brain is much more active and it’s more stimulating for the brain than to type letters on the keyboard,” said Audrey van der Meer, a brain researcher and professor of psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Dr. van der Meer conducted a study of 140 students who were quizzed after a lecture by their professor. Those who took notes by hand scored better on the quiz than those who typed their notes, she said.

For Jasmyn Rios, 17, learning cursive is a point of pride.

“My I.D. signature looks crazy, it’s a mess,” she said, while writing her name repeatedly on a piece of paper. “I wanted to come so when I do have to sign those professional documents, I’m not embarrassed.”

Ms. Rios said that she’s had to sign her name several times as she prepares to go to college, and that she was concerned about how her handwriting would look once she is in the professional world, she said.

Cursive “should be taught fundamentally in elementary schools,” she said. “I think it covers a lot more than just having professional writing — just being confident in what you’re writing when you’re writing it.”

You don’t get to know for sure what college will cost until you apply and get in. Colleges provide tools that help you guess what kind of financial aid they might offer, if any, but the numbers are often off by many thousands of dollars.

The fact that this real price is a mystery for most people at most schools is disgraceful. It also presents an opportunity.

A few weeks ago, Brandeis University quietly introduced a new tool for college shoppers called Faye. It asks questions like a person would, digests high school transcripts and tax returns, then tells you “what your Brandeis cost will be” if you get in, including both need-based and merit aid.

“Will” suggests certainty. And certainty is decidedly not what colleges offer with the net price calculators that federal law requires them to provide applicants. Those calculators are the tools that lead to sticker shock when an admission offer arrives with an actual price that is far higher than the calculators’ estimates.

I don’t know of any schools that do what Brandeis is trying. It may not work, and it may backfire in a couple of different ways. But the fact that the school is even trying it is a kind of victory for anyone who has ever wailed in agony over the complexity of college pricing and the futility of trying to figure it out.

The person who signed off on Faye (as in F.A., or financial aid) is Arthur Levine, the Brandeis president. The son of a South Bronx mailman, he was able to attend Brandeis himself in the late 1960s only because a well-off relative helped.

Dr. Levine did not come up with Faye. He has long been pals with John Katzman, whose name will be familiar to Gen X-ers who took his Princeton Review SAT classes. Mr. Katzman’s punk-rock approach to test preparation over the years, which included trying to trade his archrival’s internet address for a case of beer, made him a folk hero to students and an irritant to people in power.

I first met Mr. Katzman in the 1990s when Random House republished, under its Princeton Review imprint, an out-of-print book about gap years that I had co-written. But we hadn’t spoken in about 25 years until he emailed about Brandeis. He’s no longer affiliated with Princeton Review and started a higher-education company called Noodle in 2013.

He shopped the upfront pricing idea around for a while before trying it on Dr. Levine. But it was slow to gain traction because real pricing, pre-application, is just not how things are done in the residential undergraduate education industry.

To get any kind of a binding price under the current system, you generally must apply and get in. Then, perhaps you appeal for a better offer, if the school can digest your appeal in time. This year, Northeastern could not for some students.

And then, more! Maybe a different college surprises you with an even better offer — even after the May 1 decision deadline.

To call it a goat rodeo is to engage in a kind of goatism.

Brandeis’s enrollment team was well aware of this mess. But its members weren’t sure there was any overarching fix, given regulatory and other constraints, and they greeted Mr. Katzman with arched eyebrows.

“We thought he was nuts,” said Sherri Avery, assistant vice president of student financial services at Brandeis.

“If it could be done, someone would have been doing it, right?” said her boss, Jennifer Walker, vice president for enrollment management.

“And we wanted to do it,” Ms. Avery added.

Mr. Katzman’s premise was simple. Most need-based and merit aid calculations are formulaic and algorithmic, even if they differ at least a bit from one another. Ever-evolving technology ought to be able to handle it.

Faye is simple to use, and the price quotes it produced in my tests were easy to understand. What gave me pause was that the word “guarantee” did not appear anywhere near the dollar figure. One recent test triggered an email that was supposed to confirm Faye’s “will pay” price, but it referred to the number as a “projection.”

In my first meeting with the Noodle team, the G word came up repeatedly. Since then, however, the Brandeis and Noodle wordsmiths struggled mightily before they settled on the “will pay” language.

Why no guarantee? Blame the lawyers, who demanded asterisks that the team thought would be off-putting.

Indeed, there will be situations — estranged parents who won’t submit tax returns, small-business owners in various circumstances — that will require human intervention. A “will pay” offer could still come, but from humans, later, and not from Faye right away.

Then, there’s Faye’s garbage-in, garbage-out rule: If you make an error, it’s on you. If you lie, Brandeis won’t honor the quote. And if the software messes up, Brandeis reserves the right to re-price your deal.

There’s more. If your child is a high school sophomore or younger, the “will” does not apply, since your finances may change and Brandeis’s list price will for sure.

Brandeis may also change its merit aid formula if the school becomes more popular. It received 40 percent more applications this year, which may give the school enough marketplace power to offer fewer merit aid discounts. (Merit aid for current students doesn’t change from year to year as long as they keep their grades up and finish within eight semesters.)

And finally, if your household income or assets change drastically during your time at the school, your net price might, too, if you receive need-based financial aid.

So much throat clearing. So many maybes. All these asterisks make the whole endeavor seem asterisky, and it is.

If you’re a school, any big change in how you sell can alter who will matriculate and what they can and will pay. If net tuition revenue per student then plummets, you have an enormous problem. Competitors will scrutinize Brandeis’s tool, and some of them may undercut its prices.

And if enough people use the tool but can’t get sensible offers, the university loses them before they even apply. Application numbers could fall as quickly as they rose.

“That’s hard,” Mr. Katzman said. “But it’s the same hard as every airline and hotel and everyone in the real world has to deal with. I have to set a price, and I have to tell people what it costs.”

That’s the other reason there is no “guarantee.” College-pricing nerds like me think the word is a solution to what ails higher education. But in Faye’s testing, the word generated more questions than excitement among parents and students, and there was a risk that it might sound gimmicky.

So if you are a college shopper, test Faye mercilessly. If your finances seem broken, try to break Brandeis with your complex situation.

And save that “will pay” price quote. If you apply to Brandeis and get in, send me a note and let me know if the price changed.

But before then, ask this when you talk to other colleges: Why won’t you tell me what you will charge, pre-application? Heck, do it in the group information session in front of 100 other people. Maybe the school will surprise you.

Some institutions will make this work eventually, even if it isn’t Brandeis. And hats off to Cornell College, Whitman College and the College of Wooster, which have their own transparency initiatives.

Ms. Avery and Ms. Walker no longer think Mr. Katzman is crazy. And over lunch in March, they talked about the risk that their price quotes could scare people away.

Lost Science is an ongoing series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding after cuts by the Trump administration. The conversations have been edited for clarity and length. Here’s why we’re doing this.

Kirsten Beyer: We had a three-year study, funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, focused on environmental health among children. We had two main aims. The first was to develop a curriculum so that Milwaukee Public Schools teachers could teach about environmental health, environmental health disparities and climate change.

The second aim was to look at the impact of schoolyard greening on health and environmental outcomes. There’s this greening initiative in Milwaukee to redevelop schoolyards. Many of them were sheets of asphalt. A lot of them were in disrepair. The redevelopment plans included things like planting trees, adding outdoor classrooms, improving storm water drainage with green infrastructure and improving sports fields and natural play spaces.

We built a study to collect data before and after. There are lots of schools around the country that have similar situations, so we were excited about sharing our results and informing other jurisdictions about the impact of this redevelopment.

We had the kids complete surveys. We measured things like social and emotional health, environmental health literacy, attitudes toward outdoor play. We also had sensors that measured their physical activity levels, time spent outdoors and where they spent time in the schoolyard. We went out and observed recess. How are kids playing? How is conflict being resolved? How engaged are the teachers or monitors? We measured air pollution and how hot those schoolyards were before greening.

We were in the field in May 2025, collecting our final post-redevelopment data, when the grant was canceled. It was a shock. We had hired people as data collectors and had a month of data collection left.

I decided to rustle up some other resources just to get data collection done. But then we had no more money to support our community partners, staff or graduate students. We had to take people off this project.

Now we’re trying to do something with all of this data that we’ve collected: process it, analyze it and, importantly, share it.

We have just piles of data. There are papers that won’t get written and data that won’t be shared because this happened.

But I can’t just abandon this work. This is important to my community partners. This is important to other schools. And this is important to all of the kids who gave us their time, all the parents who allowed us to do research with their kids. There’s a moral imperative to continue the work, albeit slowly.

Kirsten Beyer is a health geographer at the Medical College of Wisconsin.