Features:School's Out. You're Not., June 3, 2008
Tuesday, June 3, 2008

School's Out. You're Not.

School’s Out. You’re Not. 

 by Linda Perlstein
Every journalist has personal interests, no matter his or her beat. As an education reporter, you may wish you had more time to pursue investigative projects. You may cover K-12 but think a lot about colleges. Your thing might be youth culture. Try to see summer vacation not as the schools-reporter dead zone but as an opportunity to follow your curiosity. For schools reporters, it’s sometimes hard to stretch beyond the boilerplate stuff about summer school and summer reading lists. You’re not alone: For most everyone at the paper, copy is hard to come by this time of year. So your editors are likely to be happy for whatever you’ll give them—even if you do stretch the definition of your beat.
If you’re into youth culture, go to the mall to sniff out the must-have items for tweens. Spend some time at the pool, and visit local summer camps. Find the kids who have no activities, too, and see how the days stretch for them.
On college campuses, check out the food service, new amenities, new classes, new housing options. Compare the acceptance rates the high schools in your districts have at local colleges. Find people who weren’t admitted to any colleges they applied to, and ask what they have planned. See how incoming freshman are making massive numbers of “friends” (quotation marks intentional) online before they ever get to campus. Focus on parents, too: how they’re scrambling to pay for college, how they’re coping, or not, with a soon-to-be-empty nest. Look back at how one student’s financial aid package fleshed out during his first year in school, by examining his budget, his family’s budget, spending beyond tuition—not just meals and books, but transportation costs, the winter clothes he had to buy to move from Florida to Boston, the spring break trip to Cabo.
Get a lemonade, pull up a lawn chair, and troll through a stack of data. There are reports with interesting tidbits coming out all the time from the National Center for Education Statistics. There are obscure rules in your district’s board policies. (I once wrote a 12-incher about one county’s neglected policy requiring teachers to mix it up in the classroom when sorting kids by alphabetical order, so as to not traumatize the Zahls and Zielinskis.) There are stories to be found in enrollment projections, salaries, curriculum guides, and budgets.
As EWA board member and Dallas Morning News reporter Kent Fischer points out, tracking school system spending provides a treasure trove of important accountability stories. Credit card expenditures, overtime pay—the best time to look back at this stuff is when everyone else is looking ahead, at future budgets. Now is a good time to check in with area university professors to see what research they’re working on. You’ll often find experts—not just in education schools but in medical schools, law schools and departments of sociology, psychology and economics, to name a few—who make for good, local sources and occasionally story ideas too.
Finally, focus on faculty. Find a principal desperately trying to fill positions at the same time teachers in the district wait ages for their assignments. Profile a new administrator, or teachers who do interesting activities over the summer: chimpanzee training, cage fighting, whatever. Attend the many conferences that take place in July and teacher orientation in August. By tracking when school really ends and begins, how educators actually spend their time and how much work they do over the summer, explain whether the “but teachers have three months off!” conventional wisdom is so wise after all.
 And if your idea bank runs dry, don’t forget that there’s always EWA. I’m on maternity leave through the summer, but that doesn’t mean you’re without a public editor—or three. A trio of excellent education journalists, who among them have eight times my experience in the field, will be available in my absence to help you:
 Mike Bowler spent 35 years as an education editor, reporter and columnist, mostly at the Baltimore Sun, before working as communications director of the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. He can be reached at mike4bowler@verizon.net, 410-719-2398, or 443-370-7677.
 Bob Frahm, a former high school English teacher, covered education for 36 years before leaving the Hartford Courant last year. Now a freelancer, Frahm was the Courant’s chief education writer for 23 years, writing about a range of topics such as testing, teacher quality, school desegregation and school reform. He can be reached at ewabobfrahm@sbcglobal.net or 860-324-2192.
 Linda Shaw has been an education enterprise reporter at the Seattle Times for 11 years, and for two years before that edited the Seattle Times Guide to Schools. She was EWA’s 2007 first-place winner in beat reporting. She can be reached at lshaw@seattletimes.com. She can also be reached at 206-464-2359 or 206-300-2788.
 They will be working as public editor on a rotating schedule. Feel free to contact them directly, or contact Mesha Williams at EWA (202-452-9830 or publications@ewa.org) to be put in touch with whoever is on call.