Follow the Money: Digging Into School District Finances

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Follow the Money: Digging Into School District Finances

August 2, 2017

When it comes to school district finances, the numbers aren’t easy to add up. But tracking and analyzing this information is a powerful tool to drive smart news coverage.

Veteran education journalist Tawnell Hobbs of The Wall Street Journal shares tips and tricks for digging into district operating budgets and actual expenditures, as well as salary databases, overtime requests, check registers and credit card accounts, purchase orders, and more. Learn how to evaluate fiscal data that’s readily available and make the most of open records requests.

‘Our First Job Is to Be Human. Our Second Job Is to Be a Journalist.’
Award-winning reporter John Woodrow Cox shares insights on covering children and gun violence
(EWA Radio: Episode 171)

August 16, 2018 Emily Richmond Subscribe to #ewaRADIO

From first-graders in rural South Carolina to high schoolers in Las Vegas, The Washington Post’s John Woodrow Cox paints searing portraits of the impact of gun violence through the eyes of the survivors themselves.

Blog: The Educated Reporter

After District Error, Reporters Publish Hidden Details on Parkland Shooter’s History
Broward County School Board wants Sun Sentinel reporters held in contempt for publishing redacted details

August 14, 2018 Emily Richmond

For reporters, it’s second nature to hold up a redacted paper document to the light to see what might still be visible. Two reporters at the South Florida Sun Sentinel are facing a possible contempt of court charge for using a digital version of this technique on a report — commissioned by Broward County Public Schools — about the shooter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

image of teacher and students at Ohio Ave school.

EWA Radio

This School Lets Teachers Decide Discipline. Is It Working?
A social-emotional approach to classroom management that's gaining steam nationally (EWA Radio: Episode 168)

August 14, 2018 Emily Richmond Subscribe to #ewaRADIO

What would happen if teachers had the flexibility to handle classroom discipline issues on a case-by-case basis, rather than following top-down mandates from the district or the principal’s office? Writing for The Atlantic, Katherine Reynolds Lewis visited Ohio Avenue Elementary School in Columbus, where an effort to rethink approaches to bad behavior appears to be paying big dividends.

Blog: The Educated Reporter

Data Visualization for Amateurs (and Experts)

August 3, 2018 Sharon Noguchi of Chalkbeat for EWA

Petrified by percentages? Or mesmerized by math?

No worries. Experts assembled for a recent Education Writers Association panel shared strategies to enlist data to tell your story, and how to convey it visually, with tips for math phobes and number nerds alike.

Data is simply a collection of structured stories, said Alvin Chang of Vox Media. Think of every row in a chart as a story, and every visual element as a sentence, he advised. Then ask: How is it better than a sentence? (If it’s not, maybe it shouldn’t be a chart.)

Blog: The Educated Reporter

Five Tips for Reporting on Infants and Toddlers
An award-winning journalist explains how, and why, to cover early childhood education

August 1, 2018 Lillian Mongeau of The Hechinger Report for EWA

If you think about education reporting as covering schools and the students who attend them, you might be scratching your head as to why infants and toddlers are newsworthy subjects. But if education reporting is really about covering learning, then children under age 4 are some of the best subjects you could imagine.

State of the Education Beat
Nation’s Education Reporters Confident They’re Making a Difference

Follow the Money: Digging Into School District Finances

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Follow the Money: Digging Into School District Finances

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