was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of .��

The rise in gas prices happened so quickly, single mom Luna Rosado has barely had time to adjust.

Rosado fills her tank twice a week to commute to her two health care jobs and shuttle her three kids to school, basketball and soccer practice.

This month, as costs have risen after the start of war in Iran, she’s been paying about $40 more a week on gas. That’s $160 less a month for groceries and everything else they need. Rosado has since had to calculate and recalculate her budget, seeing where she can find the room to absorb the changes.

“It felt almost impossible in the beginning because I didn’t know how to approach the situation. Everything’s just getting more expensive,” said Rosado, who lives with her three kids, ages 11, 9 and 7, in Plainville, Connecticut. “I’m like, ‘I can’t keep up.’”

The impact of gas prices is so broad it could . After the United States and Israel attacked Iran at the end of February, leading Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz and cut off a quarter of the world’s oil supply, single moms are one group that feels it all the more acutely as they balance rising costs on one income.

Chastity Lord, the president and CEO of the Jeremiah Program, which works with low-income single mothers, hears stories like Rosado’s nearly daily, she said — the single mom and teacher who is crashing on a friend’s couch to save on gas, or the single moms who are gig workers cutting back their Uber or DoorDash driving hours.

As of this week, the average price of a regular, unleaded gallon of gas is just over — more than $1 higher than what it was a month ago, according to AAA. In some states, like New Mexico, prices are up as much as , according to a New York Times analysis of data from GasBuddy, a gas price finder app.

“Gas cuts through everything,” Lord said. As a single mom, “you’re already underwater, and it’s almost like the gas puts weights on your feet.”

More than , and the majority of those are Black women and Latinas. Their median income is also about $17,000 less than single fathers. And though single moms work at than married mothers, they are also more likely to be paying more to fuel their commute — and spending a larger share of their income at the pump.

The families spending the highest percentage of their income on gas — — are those earning $40,000 to $49,999 a year, according to consumer expenditure data from 2024. That’s the exact bracket where many single moms are concentrated; the median income for single mothers working full-time is about .

Single moms “are going to be the first ones to feel any economic problem going on,” said Sara Estep, an economist with the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

“Because there is only one person earning money for the family, that creates a lot of sensitivity to these prices. There is very little room left to pivot at that point,” she said.

Low-income people, Lord said, are also rarely filling up their tanks the whole way, but rather putting in what they can as they go. They have increased visibility into the price jumps because they’re watching them closely day to day. “This is something that is poking you daily as you go put the gas in your car,” she said.

It becomes about tradeoffs — what can you live without? For moms, it means cutting back on going out with their kids to just focus on the basics.

Rosado, the mom in Connecticut, has started shopping at cheaper grocery stores and stopped driving for Uber and Lyft on the weekends because the increased gas prices would cut into her profits too much to make the time worth her while. That means losing supplemental money that was helping pay for her phone bill, child care and groceries.

“I’m a strong person so I roll with the punches, but I’ve had sleepless nights because of this — insomnia,” Rosado said. “It shouldn’t feel this way but it does.”

As a single mom of three teenagers, Heidi Dragneff has felt that weight much of this year. Dragneff said it now costs $60 to fill up her tank, by her calculation an increase of about 80 cents per gallon over the past two weeks, and she’s “terrified of what it’s going to look like” every time she goes to the pump. Her car recently broke down, too, so she’s debating the repair costs and the possibility of having to buy a new vehicle altogether.

On top of that, Dragneff’s rent increased $600 a month last year, her energy bills doubled this month and soon she’s going to lose child support in June for her eldest daughter who just turned 18, which means a cut of $400 a month. Moving is out of the question because she doesn’t have enough in savings to cover first and last months’ rent and security deposits. Recently, she stopped contributing to her 401K to cut back.

“I end up trying to make lists of budgets, like, where is all of my money going? How is it disappearing so quickly? And you go over these numbers over and over and over again, and nothing changes,” said Dragneff, who is a Navy veteran now doing organizing work for other veterans in Virginia Beach.

Single moms, she said, have to figure it out alone.

“From the outside it looks like we are these super strong women that have it all together when we are struggling just as much as anybody else, if not more,” she said. “Our kids are looking to us. It’s our responsibility, [on] our shoulders, to not lose our job, to make sure that we are able to make ends meet, keep the lights on and pay the rent.”

What’s also been challenging over the past few years, single moms told The 19th, is the unpredictability of where the price changes are occuring. A few years ago, the story was all about rising . Now it’s gas, too.

“We don’t even know what’s going to happen day to day just watching the news,” said Taylour Grant, a single mom of four — ages 2, 7, 9 and 14 — in Tampa, Florida.

Grant’s food stamps were cut by nearly $200 a month recently after changes to the eligibility requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in Florida last month. That means she has even less wiggle room to cut back on other things, like groceries, as gas prices climb.

She blamed the Trump administration for the instability.

“They don’t have the everyday worries that we have. They don’t have to worry about feeding their kids. They don’t have to worry about getting gas,” Grant said. “I’m pretty sure they don’t know how much a gallon of milk costs, so it’s just them not being mindful of us down here.”

With the midterm elections approaching in November, Democrats and Republican strategists have agreed that affordability will top the list of voter concerns this cycle. It’s a topic that has been highly motivational for mothers, who are often the ones . Women, more than men, report more concern about paying their bills , according to a taken in September.

Sondra Goldschein, the executive director of the Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy, which backs candidates that support issues like paid parental leave and affordable child care, is knocking on doors this election cycle talking to mothers about cost of living issues. In the organization’s conversations with voters, Goldschein said, they “are seeing people really step forward to voice their strong concerns and looking for various outlets to help make changes, whether it’s who they’re going to vote for or whether they’re going to run for office themselves.”

The Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy PAC this year is supporting Democrats in Senate races in North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Maine and Ohio and in House races in Iowa and Pennsylvania.

Lord is also hearing that the affordability crisis is mobilizing moms. At an early March conference of 600 single mothers, Lord said there was one session that was absolutely packed: “Why Women Don’t Run & Why They Should.”

“Moms are interested in being involved in campaigns, doing door knocking … There’s a deep desire to be involved in reimagining what’s possible for themselves, their family, but also their community,” Lord said. “Yes, there’s incredible stress, there’s incredible fatigue, alarm, vulnerability, but … people are like, ‘What do I need to do? Who do I need to hold accountable? What role do I play in changing what is happening in my local community?’”

“It is political,” said Samantha Shepherd, a child care director in Savannah, Georgia, and a single mom of two girls ages 6 and 7. Recently, one single mother whose children attend her center said she might not be able to take the kids to school because of the gas prices.

“We’re suffering for the drastic decisions that are being made by those who sit in the White House or those who are our legislators,” she said. “It’s important that people understand their voices need to be heard as well. Collectively, we can make a lasting sound, but if we don’t make no noise about it, they’re not even going to hear us.”

In the past few years, the world has seemed to change faster than ever. Smartphones, AI, social media and the constant flow of information have transformed daily life. Yet one thing has barely changed: the history curriculum in K–12 schools. The world may be moving fast, but history textbooks are not.

The war in Iran shows how badly educators need to change the way we teach the past. We can’t begin with distant history — the 13 colonies, ancient Egypt or classical Greece — and expect students to figure out why any of it matters. We need to begin with the world students are living in now, with the headlines they already see every day. They need to understand what’s happening in Iran before they learn it was once the Persian empire. Once they understand the present, they can begin to understand why the story of how we got here matters.

History explains our nation’s politics, our institutions, our ideas and our wars. But why should students care about how we got to the modern world if they do not understand the modern world in the first place? It is hard to make sense of the past, or even care about it, if you do not understand the present.

And yet, America still teaches history from the colonial period or classical antiquity forward. Our curricula, though not our teachers, assume students will make the connection from past to present on their own. But the worldview of a 14-year-old, fresh out of middle school and getting most of their news from TikTok, will be incomplete at best.

Schools cannot begin with history without first asking what they know about the present: Do they know where Iran is? (.) What kind of government it has? How its economy works? Why the region matters geopolitically? If we asked, we would find that many students know very little about the wider world as it exists right now. That helps explain why they so often struggle to care about its history.

Because classrooms so often teach Ivan the Terrible and Alexander the Great in a vacuum, they get lackluster results. Scores in U.S. history have declined sharply, with just 13% of middle school students performing at grade level. Yet more than 75% of high school students following current events is important to them, and 93% say more opportunities to discuss current events in the classroom.

At our school, in the Bronx, we focus on computer science, technology and internships. But our mission is larger than that: to prepare students to navigate the economy and the world. A year ago, when we looked at our graduating seniors, we found that many knew little about the world they actually live in. That is why we revamped our 9th-grade history curriculum.

Before teaching U.S. and world history, we teach students about the world as it exists today. In 9th grade, they study geography, economic systems, governments and culture in the present. That way, they can understand history as an attempt to explain the world around them, not as a random collection of facts.

We examine major powers and regions — Iran, China, the U.K., Mexico, Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria and the U.S. — and ask basic questions. How does each country’s economy work? What is its political system? How well does it serve the people who live there? What languages do people speak and what religions do they practice? How do states compete for power?

The result is that students have a framework for everything they learn later in high school.

So when federal food assistance was suspended a few months ago and students in my class were struggling to afford groceries, we turned that into a short study of federal systems and how different levels of government work. When the war in Iran began, our students already had baseline knowledge. I asked why they thought we were at war, and they talked about the strategic value of oil and the challenges of an authoritarian theocracy. They were able to think critically about what they saw on TikTok instead of simply absorbing it.

The crisis led to serious classroom conversations. Students were equipped with knowledge.

Rethinking how schools teach history takes on new urgency because social media now delivers global events to students instantly. They see what is happening in the world whether adults are ready for it or not. As educators, we have a responsibility to help them process that information with reason. We want them to think independently, not simply absorb what an algorithm feeds them.

That is especially important in an age of misinformation. It is also more engaging. When students do not see a connection between school and their own lives, absenteeism rises and disengagement follows. Starting from what is relevant to students’ lives and backgrounds is critical if we want to build students who are curious and eager to learn.

To my fellow educators, especially history teachers: I understand the hesitation. In a hyperpolarized political climate, teaching current events can be a scary and thankless task. But we have to be brave.

If our families and our students see that we are helping them make sense of what is happening in the world right now, they will remember why school matters and why our profession matters to our communities and our country. And if more people understand both the world we live in now and how it got this way, we may be able to educate a generation of leaders better prepared for the crises yet to come.