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First Prize Winners: How I Did the StoryNarratives from EWA's 2007 First Prize WinnersStory Headlines from First Prize Winners See grand prize winner's narrative here. IA. Newspapers Under 100,000--Breaking or Hard News "Virginia Tech Shootings"It's not difficult to explain how we "got" the story on the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech. But our teamwork in handling the story after it "got" allowed us to give readers a full and timely treatment of a national story unfolding in their backyard. I received a call from a source around 9:15 a.m. telling me about a shooting at Virginia Tech. He had heard about it because his wife worked at a local elementary schools. No one had reported on anything unusual happening at Tech at that point. I told my editors and began making my calls but got voicemails or people on campus who had no idea anything was amiss. I began updating the Tech web page and at 9:26 the university sent out the first announcement of shootings on campus earlier that morning. I posted the first mention of the shootings online about 9:30 a.m. and left for campus. My editor scrambled photographers, including Alan Kim, from his home in Blacksburg. Alan would take the photos that the world would later associate with the shootings. On my way to campus -- about a 10 minute drive from our bureau. I received another call from an editor. The police scanner was talking about a live shooting and I was told to go to Norris Hall, not West Ambler Johnston Dormitory. I arrived to find the building surrounded by police. A few minutes later I spoke with the first students to evacuate the building. The rest of the day was spent communicating updates to my editors, talking to other reporters and photographers as we tried to get our arms around the story. I wish I could say there was some secret to our extensive coverage that day and later that week, but it was just the result of a lot of people and a lot of hustle. Editors were supportive throughout and people put their egos aside to get the most complete story about what happened out there as quickly as possible. I've never been prouder of my colleagues. --Greg Esposito, The Roanoke Times. Click here to read story. IC. Newspapers Under 100,000--Series or Group of Articles "Cost-Cutters Target Teacher Benefits"My winning entry involved a package of stories on teacher health-insurance, a highly controversial topic in Michigan. Most Michigan teacher contracts require school districts to purchase insurance through an affiliate of the Michigan Education Association. It is very, very good insurance but it also is very expensive. In fact, I could not find a Michigan employer who pays more for health insurance than school districts. The story is especially timely because Michigan school funding is very, very tight and most districts have been cutting staff and services for the past five years. Yet districts have maintained this expensive insurance, even as they cut other items on their budget. My stories looked at the cost differential between the union insurance and what other employers paid; the reasons why the insurance is so expensive and why it's so hard for districts to change to another carrier, and the financial impact on school districts and students. It also raised the issue of whether the MEA is putting its own self-interest before its members by encouraging teachers to forego raises rather than switch insurance plans. The MEA was furious, and wrote a viewpoint for our editorial, but they did not cite any factual errors in the story. --Julie Mack, Kalamazoo Gazette. Click here to read story. ID. Newspapers Under 100,000--Investigative Reporting "PHEAA Spending"My stories on the spending habits of the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency grew out of six years of covering a state agency that had fallen under most media outlets’ radar for years.
--Jan Murphy, Patriot-News IIA. Newspapers Over 100,000--Breaking or Hard News "Blemished Backgrounds: The Past of School Bus Drivers"When Columbus police stopped a school bus driver for making an illegal turn in January, they found a syringe of cocaine on board and a driver with a shocking history. The situation raised an alarming question: How could someone with three drunken-driving convictions and four other traffic offenses be fit to drive children? The incident brought the state’s largest fleet of school buses to a halt and forced a one-day cancellation of classes at Columbus Public Schools and other public and private schools that rely on Columbus buses for student transportation. A team of Dispatch reporters set out to make sense of the daily developments and explain the flaws that allowed this man to drive a school bus. Reporters began by asking school districts what their hiring policies were: Who can drive a bus? They quickly discovered that the private company that hired the driver had failed to make required background checks and that districts weren’t following their own hiring policies. In addition, the Dispatch investigation found that ill-conceived state policies allowed districts to review only the most recent three years of driving records for school bus drivers. Exactly how many drivers with spotty histories were on the road was unclear, so The Dispatch requested a list of the state’s bus drivers from the Ohio Department of Education. Reporters found drivers right away that had previous drunken-driving convictions; some were highlighted in breaking news stories. To dig deeper, the team crafted a query for a Nexis SmartLinx search to find drivers who held a commercial license, which qualified them to drive a school bus, and who had alcohol convictions on their records. The Dispatch examined records of more than 900 school bus drivers in central, eastern and southeastern Ohio and found more than 150 who had been convicted of drug and alcohol offenses. In most cases, their districts had no idea. The payoff was great, but a word of warning: using Nexis to search people isn’t cheap. And the process was tedious. The stories forced major reforms. A new law bans drivers from school buses who have been convicted of drunken driving in the previous six years or have been involved in major traffic offenses in the previous two years. It also provides school districts access to complete driving histories and gives the Ohio Department of Education the authority to perform ongoing background checks. The law is working. Since September, the state has alerted school districts to dozens of school bus drivers who have been arrested or caught with a suspended license. --Jennifer Smith Richards, Columbus Dispatch IIC. Newspapers Over 100,000--Series or Group of Articles "Cross-Currents in Mainstreaming"Over the past quarter century, few policy changes have transformed public education more dramatically than the movement to include more children with disabilities in mainstream classrooms. Most of the country’s six million special-education pupils are now taught this way. Yet the rise in mainstreaming and its far-reaching effects on teachers and students have received little scrutiny. In a series of stories last year, a team of Wall Street Journal reporters revealed how often mainstreaming has failed to live up to its promise, hurting some of the very children it was meant to help. Reporters Robert Tomsho, John Hechinger and Daniel Golden documented that school systems across the country, using mainstreaming as a pretext to cut costs, have dumped students with serious emotional and behavioral problems into regular classrooms with little or no support. Although school officials say that disabled students learn more in regular classrooms than in separate ones, the Journal articles showed this apparent improvement is often due to easy grading and excessive “accommodations” that inflate test results. They also reported a parental backlash against the movement. The reporters were able to expose mainstreaming’s shortcomings by obtaining special-education and school-discipline statistics through requests under freedom-of-information laws and by tracking down disenchanted parents and teachers. Through these sources, they gained access to confidential documents, including thousands of pages recording disputes between parents and school systems. The Journal also provided voluminous statistical back-up in an online chartbook and produced an Internet videos documenting the tragic consequences of mainstreaming gone awry. ---Robert Tomsho, John Hechinger and Daniel Golden, The Wall Street Journal. Click here to read story. IIIA. Beat Reporting--Small Media or Market "Andy Hall Beat Coverage"After I'd worked more than 15 years as a full-time investigative reporter, my editors reassigned me to the K-12 education beat. I feared I'd waste away in school board meetings. It was challenging to build connections to sources while covering a broad range of breaking, in-depth and feature stories. Most of these issues probably are part of the landscape in your community -- things like problems with the state's school-funding system, rising class sizes, divisive referendums and the impact of budget cuts on vulnerable students.Three approaches that paid off:
2) Tracking down data to bring stories into focus, even on deadline. File a public records request if necessary, but first see if an informal request or a Web hunt will yield what you need. There's power in a basic Excel analysis that shows which districts' enrollments are falling the most sharply, or where poverty is most highly concentrated. 3) Jumping through hoops for a photographer and me to spend time in classrooms.That's where we were able to connect readers directly to the impact of rising class sizes, or to the effects that cuts in special education will have on students. --Andy Hall, The Wisconsin Journal. Click here to read story. IIIB. Beat Reporting--Large Media or Market "Linda Shaw Beat Reporting"
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I began covering PHEAA’s meetings after discovering through a salary survey that nine of the top 10 salaries in state government in 2002 were paid to PHEAA executives. Learning that made me curious what this agency did. So I set out to satisfy my curiosity. 
"It would have been easy to let a story about a small, radical private school sit, forgotten, at the bottom of the pile of story ideas and clips and studies that threaten to take over my desk. First, Clearwater School has just 60 kids. It barely fits what most people would call a school since it has no classes, and no teachers. (It’s run with the philosophy that learn best when they direct their own education, without any prompting from adults.)
Hernandez promises her clients anonymity and privacy. She was willing to approach clients on our behalf, though—which we appreciated but which is also made us a bit apprehensive. But none of her current clients was willing to be named (let alone be photographed) in the midst of the admissions process. Then Hernandez gave us the names of the very few pro bono clients she works with. We interviewed them, but decided not to include them in the story precisely because they hadn’t paid the tens of thousands of dollars for Hernandez’s services that most every other client had. Finally, we realized that we would have to look for clients who were in college or who had graduated already. We did eventually find several students (and parents) who were comfortable talking to us, and we profiled two of them extensively in the story. Of course, interviewing people about experiences that occurred several years ago presented its own challenges. We were trying to weave together their stories with Michele’s and determining specific and reliable dates for certain conversations and decisions required a lot of back and forth, checking and confirming and correcting details with everybody. Not to mention patience on our editor’s part. 
National Guard to prevent nine black teenagers from entering Central High School, President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded by sending troops from the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army to protect the students as they entered the building. To mark the 50th anniversary of the forced integration of Central High School, Little Rock natives Brent and Craig Renaud followed the lives of contemporary Central High students, teachers and administration, as well as community leaders and members of the Little Rock Nine, over the course of a year, visiting classes, school meetings and assemblies, teenagers’ homes and community events. Sharing the stories of both black and white students, the special revealed the opportunities and challenges facing them in and out of the classroom. For many Americans, the desegregation of Central High is merely a chapter in history books. But the students of Little Rock Central High live in the ever-present wake of this historic event, growing up amidst complex race, class and socio-economic issues. Today, though the school is desegregated, some say it is still not fully integrated. 
Finally in the spring of 2005, the school and the City created the Central High School 50th Anniversary Commission and began making plans for what they knew would be a milestone anniversary commemoration event for one of the most pivotal civil rights moments in our nation’s history. The 40th Anniversary commemoration ceremonies at Central High in 1997 were a major national news event, when President Bill Clinton symbolically reopened the doors of Central High for the Little Rock Nine, who had all gathered together for the first time since 1957. Everyone knew that the 50th Anniversary would be even bigger, and would perhaps be the last time that all of the members of the Little Rock Nine would be able to attend. The school and the City also knew that they would be getting hundreds of requests from national news outlets, reporters and documentary filmmakers from around the world, all wanting exclusive access to this major historical event. They were correct in their thinking, and received literally hundreds of requests for access to the school.
My disadvantage as a radio reporter is that I'm conspicuous--my equipment makes it impossible to blend in. But my advantage is that when I get a good exchange on tape, it can be dynamite. Hearing teachers in this school yelling at kids was shocking to me. It was even more shocking to listeners. The school district eventually asked me to leave the school. Administrators said, it was because I wasn't focused on their efforts to meet standards. In my opinion, it was because they had never really listened to the sounds of their own schools.One more thing: this was a painful experience. I grew close to the teachers and administrators at this school, and I still feel a twinge of guilt when I recall how badly many of them came off in my stories. I knew that some teachers' careers might be harmed by what they said in our stories. But that's our job, to shine a spotlight on schools. In the end, many teachers said, they learned a lot about their own schools from listening to these pieces.