Former Statesman education reporter Raven Hill urged reporters to do their homework before attending a board meeting and to cultivate a relationship with the communications director, the position she now holds at the Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland. She also said that mainstream papers sometimes focus on the personalities of the board members and not the policies they are putting into place.
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WASHINGTON D.C.—In the #nhsjc2019 keynote session on Thursday, NBC journalist Chuck Todd urged student journalists not to cover the 2020 presidential election but rather to cover local politics, city council and school board meetings where the decisions that have the greatest impact in the lives of their readers are made.
In that same spirit, Jay P. Goldman, the editor of School Administrator magazine, and Raven Hill, a former Austin American-Statesman education reporter and now the communications director of the Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland, presented a session intended to convince journalists that they should cover their local school boards and to equip them with strategies to do it well.
Goldman argued that school board coverage has high news value but has received relatively low media attention in most school newspapers. He also pointed out that with approximately 1,800 newspapers going out of business since 2004, in many towns, the school newspaper is the only one that can cover school board news well.
Sophia Comas, the online editor in chief of The Mentor in Manhattan, Kan., said that the whole point of covering board meetings is to serve as a middle man between the school board and the students at your school.
Hill talked about her career on both sides of this issue: as an education reporter in both Austin and in Baltimore. She urged reporters to do their homework before attending a board meeting and to cultivate a relationship with the communications director, the position she now holds. She also advocated live tweeting board meetings to get the news out quickly and develop a reputation for being the source for board news. Hill also said that mainstream papers sometimes focus on the personalities of the board members and not the policies they are putting into place. Student journalist Sophia Comas, the online editor in chief of The Mentor at Manhattan (Kan.) High School, said that approach is misguided.
“The story isn’t about the school board. It’s about how what the school board does affects students at your school. The whole point is to be a middle man between the school board and the students at your school.” Comas shared a personal story to illustrate the important of covering school board elections well. The school board issued a deadline for students at her school to document that they had received the meningitis vaccines.
Students at her school will be unenrolled by Dec. 2 if they don’t document receiving the vaccine by the deadline. Comas also mentioned that because she was in DC for the convention, she had to cover the most recent school board meeting over a Facebook live stream. Her dedication to covering her local school board and board policies that affect readers at her school (as well as the arguments made advocating this coverage at this year’s DC convention) has inspired us at Macjournalism to cover the school board with the same zeal in the future.
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