The bloody transformation to the school beat

Grisly homicides, drive-by shootings and serial rapists.
Those are the types of stories this female reporter from Southwest Florida wrote about for close to a decade.
But when the education reporter at our paper left to get her masters, this crime writer was politely asked if she minded taking over that beat.
“Do I have a choice?” I asked my editor.
“Not really,” he responded.
Why me? I thought.
I don’t have kids. I don’t even have nieces or nephews.
Frankly, the thought of covering education makes me want to play a round of Russian roulette.
I want blood and guts. I want to expose corruption and justice.
That’s exciting.
That’s what people want to read about.
So far on my new beat I’ve covered kindergarten plays, attended school board meetings and reviewed SAT results.
This week I’m in San Francisco with education reporters from across the country learning how to better cover my beat. But my main goal is finding a handful of juicy story ideas while attending the Education Writers Association’s 63rd national seminar.
Aptly, the first session I picked was for reporters new to the beat.
Facilitatators Linda Perlstein of EWA, Beth Shuster of the Los Angeles Times and David Hunn of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch led the 3 ½ hour session focused on how to stay on top of this massive beat. To boot, Perlstein said there’s no more interesting of a time to be in the education beat.
And that's not sarcasm, she said. Things are changing fast, especially with growing national interest in K-12 education reform.
Here are a few things that stuck out:
To learn the lay of the land, one must build a calendar, create a contact list and request public records.
But most importantly, get into schools – public, private, preschool and charter (yes I know they are public too).
That’s where you find the meat for stories.
My most intriguing lesson of the day?
You can carve a niche out of this beat.
“Pick up the things that intrigue you the most,” Perlstein said.
You can be a court reporter, you can be a crime reporter, or you can be a feature reporter.
“It’s what you bring to it in terms of your interest,” Shuster said.
I realized this when the group started discussing teacher merit pay – a hot issue in Florida right now after Gov. Charlie Crist last month killed a bill that prompted sick-outs, sit-ins, street protests and a flood of opposition throughout the state. Calling it “significantly flawed,” Crist decried the bill — which would link teacher pay to student test scores and eliminate tenure for all new hires — as both overreaching and too vague.
We were encouraged to find out more about the teachers in the districts we cover.
Where did they get their training?
How are they hired, evaluated and weeded out if necessary?
And how does their evaluation process work?
How much of a background check do they do for new hires? Do they drug test?
Ok, at this point my interest is sparked so I chime in.
I tell the trio of education experts I know a teacher who I know does drugs and drinks too much. She never grades papers and is constantly getting bad reviews.
This is a woman teaching impressionable young minds, yet can barely make a good decision on her own, I think. She is supposed to be instilling good decision-making in her students.
When the teacher and I interact about her job she says, “All I have to do is make it through this school year and I’m in. I’ll have a contract and be protected by the union. Then they can’t fire me.”
I might not be able to cover a drug dealer’s trafficking trial right now and tell readers they’ve been convicted and sentenced to 25 years behind bars.
But I can write a story about teachers with drug habits and how hard it is for them to get caught and axed from employment.
Yeah, this could be fun.

Natalie Neysa Alund
Bradenton Herald
nalund@bradenton.com
http://www.bradenton.com/