When looking at story ideas for my final story for my intermediate reporting class, a story on bullying immediately jumped out at me. Given how bullying and anti-bullying initiatives  have recently been in the public eye, I figured it would be an interesting—yet easy—story. I thought people would be more than willing to talk about what their schools are doing to combat the bullying epidemic.

Boy, I was wrong.

Never have I had more problems getting people to talk. Of the 11 principals and about 25 guidance counselors I’ve contacted via email or voicemail, only one responded and she was so unhelpful that she’s not even worth being a source. This source in particular held strong that bullying doesn’t exist in her school. She laid out a few of the school’s programs that teach students how to combat bullying but wouldn’t go into detail. Call me a skeptic, but I find it incredibly hard to believe that a school has very few to absolutely no issues with bullying. This isn’t to say that kids are that rude, but even as adults, humans constantly judge one another, more often than not ostracizing anyone who is different or perceived as weaker. It’s horrid, but I find it to be true.

While I’ve been able to speak with a few people, I’ve found it incredibly difficult for anyone to really commit to talking about how large of an issue it is. The only source that I found to be candid and refreshing was a UW police officer who admitted that he finds bullying will be a persistent problem we’ll never fully be able to get rid of, no matter how hard we try. It may be such a downer of a thought, but at least he wasn’t trying to sugarcoat anything.

Bullying is such a prevalent issue in our society, especially with recent teen suicides that resulted from bullying. The topic may be tough to tackle, but I was surprised that more people haven’t been willing to speak about it. How are we supposed to fix something if people aren’t willing to publicly acknowledge or talk about it out of the realm of their comfort zone?

The goal of a charter school initiative is to provide an alternative strategy to bring learning to a classroom. This learning isn’t through the pages of a book, or through memorizing mathematical equations, but instead it’s through hands-on projects, student collaboration and working in an independent environment. Or at least this is how Highland Middle School Teacher Julie explained her experience with charter school learning.

As one of several middle school staff tasked with the implementation of the charter initiative in 2010, Tess began her first project with students that autumn. She centered the project on her students’ interest in learning more about the history of Highland and its residents.

Tess sent out the students to interview some of the older citizens of the community, each equipped with a video camera and a carefully selected set of questions.

“They were scared, they were very nervous,” Tess said of the children. “A lot of them had never talked to these [senior citizens] before, and they definitely didn’t know how to use video cameras. Most of the shots they had were horrible.”

Despite a bumpy start, students returned to the classroom with their finished interviews and began to compile stories from different individuals in the community to paint a portrait of Highland from 20, 30, even 50 years ago.

As the project came to an end, several residents that students had interviewed passed away. In an attempt to reach out to the community and forge a connection between Highland and its charter school, students provided copies of their interviews with residents’ families.

Tess said she believes the project has provided a larger sense of meaning to her students and the community.

“We recorded something,” Tess said. “We recorded history, and we have a piece of it. You can’t pretend that’s not something big.”

Tess is the only middle school staff member who has remained at Highland School District since the onset of the charter school initiative, a phenomenon she believes is a result of Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial budget repair bill and its effects on public employees. She has helped to introduce new teachers to the process while still learning how to proceed with the new learning style herself.

“Things are going well with the new staff, but it was like starting over,” Tess said. “I can’t help but think that my team left education because of our new governor. How sad. We can’t afford to lose good teachers.”

Tess and her fellow staff members have faced countless obstacles but are still continuing to work toward the implementation of the charter school initiative. With strong support from students and the community, things are looking up for Highland School District.

My contribution to this website included discussing referendums within Wisconsin school districts. This article originally seemed outside of my interests, I understood the importance of improving educational facilities, but I originally did not know what the story would be.

The first step in the process was to put a name and location to the story, give people a reason to care about what they are reading. Since it is a Wisconsin focused website, I selected two area school districts that had recently gone through the referendum process, Beloit and Oregon. These schools offered many contrasts that provided story lines. For one, the Beloit referendum passed and the Oregon one was rejected. Also, as the poorest area in Wisconsin, Beloit provided insight about the economic impact of referendums, especially compared to a fairly well-to-do Oregon community.

But, the part that was the most relevant to my interests was one of the reasons that the Oregon referendum was rejected. The Oregon School Board had proposed a $33 million proposal that would increase the schools safety and update many of the district’s facilities.  However, one of the main reasons that the Oregon citizens voted against it was because they did not believe the money was going directly to education.

Oregon’s plans involved creating a safer environment and updating classrooms, but the proposal that caused the most dissent was the update in athletic facilities at the school. The high school would have received a state-of-the-art field house, as well as turf soccer field and many other updated fields.

This is where problems arose.

Many voters said it was unreasonable, that athletics did not have their place in an educational referendum, that the proposal was more about making the school attractive than actually improving education.

Now I am not saying whether I would have voted yes or no, I do not know what I would have done. But, I do believe athletics have their place in the educational system.

For many students, the call of an education is not enough to get them to attend school. The opportunity to be a part of a team is more important to some. That doesn’t mean that this is right, but there will always be students who are not interested in the academic aspects of school.

Athletics provide these people with an opportunity and reason to attend school and actually become students. An opportunity to enhance athletic facilities enables more people to enjoy their time playing, watching, or coaching a game. This higher level of enjoyment encourages future generations to want to attend school.

Now, that is not to say that some places don’t go too far with their amateur athletics, because they do. In many places, high school athletics receive a distorted amount of attention, at the expense of the student-athletes education. Glorifying athletes to a point that academic accomplishments go out the window is not the way to go. But, the idea that athletic facilities are not important in school at least deserves a discussion.

High school is about learning one’s interests and gaining a base that encourages one to pursue a further education. For some, athletics provide this base.

I’ve always found social media to be an especially intriguing phenomenon.  I even started a personal blog last year where I comment on interesting articles that address the many ways social media impacts our world and changes the ways we interact.  So I naturally jumped on the chance to investigate different ways social media is being integrated into UW-Madison courses.

In researching the story, I enjoyed interviewing different professors and hearing their reasoning for incorporating social media outlets, like Twitter and Facebook, into their classes.  It was also interesting to compare and contrast the variety of ways professors leverage social media as a learning tool, and I identified some common practices, such as the creation of a course hashtag so that students’ tweets could be aggregated and then blended into discussions.

But the insight I found most compelling was the response from professors that social media creates a greater sense of community among students.  On a large campus like UW-Madison, it can be easy for students to feel disconnected and isolated, and identifying a smaller community of friends can sometimes be difficult, especially for an underclassman.

However, incorporating social media into the classroom fosters a more collaborative environment that allows students to connect in a unique way that can translate outside of the classroom.  Students often feel freer to share their knowledge and experiences in the fluid social media sphere, rather than in a more rigid classroom setting; and it is this sharing that helps students discover common interests or viewpoints and potentially build friendships.

One of the professors I interviewed, Shawn Peters, brought up an interesting paradox, explaining that social media is commonly criticized for building barriers between individuals and not promoting face-to-face interaction.  But he has found in his courses that social media does the exact opposite.  Peters said he has seen social media help to create and nurture relationships among his students and generate a more vibrant learning community.

With the evolution of the digital sphere, the world is shrinking as boundaries are being shattered and greater associations are being built.  Technology has always played a part in bringing us together, from planes, trains, and automobiles to the telephone, and the digital age is no different.  I think it is amazing how digital innovations allow for the greater sharing of ideas and the building of associations, especially because it is easy for us to retreat to the comfort of our familiar communities and forget to consider the diversity of our world and the differing needs of others.  But through technology like social media, we have the potential to become a more attentive, cohesive global society that can unite around shared ideas and more effectively achieve social change for a broader population.

We talk a lot in journalism about including more diversity of perspectives in our reporting. We also emphasize the concept, ‘do no harm.’ In writing this article, I think I landed on the exact spot where those two cross.

I chose the topic of diversity in K-12 education because writing this article would force me to discuss issues that I have shied away from for fear of offending – “do no harm” – and for fear of revealing my own ignorance.

Julie Frentz, principal of Frank Allis Elementary School, on which the story focused, summed up the dilemma succinctly: “For us white people, we’re not used to talking about color.”

So, I entered this project both excited to learn and anxious that I would ignorantly phrase a question in an inappropriate or callous way that would insult the teachers, principals, parents and experts I planned to interview or that some implication in the final article would offend readers. That was one side of the puzzle. On a more personal level, I was embarrassed by my own lack of knowledge and nervous that my anxiety would prevent me from asking the questions necessary to get the story right.

Stephen Quintana, a professor of counseling psychology at UW-Madison, described this phenomenon as lacking the necessary language. I found my mind returning to this phrase quite a bit throughout the course of the project.

The interviews were going to be the most challenging part, so I started by contacting experts at the university for a wide-angle, more scientific perspective. All whom I reached openly discussed the value of a multicultural approach to education, and I relied heavily on the words and phrases they used in their online bios and our interviews to build my own vocabulary.

But I also did research. Here are a couple articles and clips I found most helpful in beginning these conversations:

• Race relations through a child’s eyes – CNN, Anderson Cooper 360 (http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2012/04/03/ac-pkg-doll-test-part-one.cnn)
• Children’s Perceptions of Race & Friendship (Sociological Images study with CNN): (http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/04/04/childrens-perceptions-of-race-friendship/)
• A Prom Divided (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24prom-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all): This article, and especially the accompanying audio slideshow, helped me understand the ways our nation continues to be divided in our understanding of each other, but also literally in some cases. It struck me when one white mother said in the video (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/05/24/magazine/dividedproms-audioss/index.html) that prom has always been segregated in the town and everyone was fine with it – a statement that directly contradicts the perspectives of many of the students, white and black.

Frentz, who has been talking about race very openly in her school, said she learned to discuss issues of diversity by listening closely and asking questions. I have done my best to adopt that approach in writing this article, and I would like to believe it’s working.

But fundamentally it was also the willingness of the teachers, parents and principals – who are not all accustomed to being interviewed, particularly by a student reporter – to openly and patiently discuss their experiences and knowledge that helped me learn the most. For that I am very, very thankful.

All of the interviews were difficult, but when I finally sat down over a cup of delicious green tea with Shahanna Baldon, the district’s new chief diversity officer, I had a better idea of how to phrase my questions in a way that was direct but respectful.

Like anything, it’s a work in progress, and I still have a long way to go. Yet my vocabulary and perspective have progressed from where they were when I began this project just a few weeks ago.

The future of race-based university admissions policies may lie in the hands of one man this fall: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

With the Supreme Court scheduled to rule on its first case regarding affirmative action in the university setting since 2003 later in the year, many supporters fear the end of the policy may be near.

Abigail Noel Fisher sued the University of Texas-Austin in 2008 after she was denied admission into the school’s undergraduate program. Fisher, who is white, argued she was not accepted because the university’s affirmative action program gave preference to minority students over white applicants, which violates her constitutional right to equal protection.

Ideologically, the Supreme Court has been divided in recent years. Currently, the high court consists of four conservative-leaning justices and four liberal-leaning justices, leaving Kennedy as the lone moderate.

University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and Supreme Court expert Ryan Owens said the four conservatives on the Court are likely to vote to strike down UT-Austin’s policy, while three of the four liberal justices are expected to uphold it. The fourth liberal, Justice Elena Kagan has rescued herself from the case. That means whichever faction Kennedy decides to side with may ultimately determine the Court’s final ruling.

“The answer, I think is quite clear,” Owens said. “The Court is going to be as conservative on affirmative action as Justice Kennedy is willing for it to be.”

Owens said Kennedy has shown support for affirmative action as a tool to promote diversity on college campuses in past cases, but said there is a chance he could strike down UT-Austin’s policy specifically because it is not narrowly tailored enough to meet that goal.

“(Kennedy) is going shift the status quo to the right, but it’s not going to shift so far to the right that it undoes affirmative action,” Owens said, meaning many campuses would have to alter their admissions policies, but not totally scrap affirmative action.

Barring an unforeseen change of heart from one of the other justices, the fate of affirmative action will be up to Kennedy’s decision alone as he decides how to cast his swing vote over the course of the following months.

What do you think? Will the Supreme Court uphold UT-Austin’s admissions policy this fall or strike it down?

For the theme of edUtopia, I undertook the challenge of determining who deserves an education in Wisconsin. While some decided to look at the traditional K-12 or University aged students, I thought the notion of expanding early childhood education seemed interesting. I wanted to know if the new 4-year-old kindergarten program in Madison was actually teaching something to kids, or if it was simply childcare funded by taxpayers.

The story had some inherent difficulties that many up-and-coming reporters might carelessly overlook. When reporting on children, reporters cannot take photographs of them without specific consent from the parents, teachers or administrators. Every parent must sign a form at the beginning of the school year either allowing the media to photograph their child for promotional purposes or not. If they opt out of the media clause, any photograph may be punishable by law.

During my reporting experience, I asked teachers and principals multiple times for specific consent. While at a public elementary school, the principal said that I was not allowed to take photographs of the kids because some had opted out. I was not told which children I was unable to photograph, so I had to omit them all. To still get good photos, I decided to take pictures of the kids’ art projects or table spaces to get a feel for the their personalities.

Another distinctive part of reporting on children is that they are unpredictable and often impatient with questions. Since the classrooms I interviewed were filled with 4-year-olds, I had to make sure all my questions were developmentally appropriate. I stuck with simple who, what, when, where, why and how questions with only one part to get the best answers. Surprisingly, some of the most thoughtful answers I got came from the simplest questions.

The best part about reporting on kids is that they lead simple and fun lives. Everything around them is interesting and exciting, and matching their enthusiasm makes reporting a lot of fun. Getting involved with their activities and sitting down to play blocks with them showed me more about their hopes and dreams than I could have ever got sitting in a chair and questioning them. For the best stories on children, a reporter shouldn’t be afraid of participating. While the definition of reporting simply means observing and communicating an event, children respond more naturally when they see everyone around them as interested as they are.

The curiosity of children reminds us why most of us became reporters. We are a curious profession. We like to ask questions, get our hands dirty and listen to stories. At the end of my edUtopia experience, I realize that I must never lose that childhood curiosity because it drives the quality of my interviews, the details of my situations, and eventually, the depths to my stories.

Writing about a topic as controversial as Madison Prep was definitely an eye-opening experience. With each person I spoke to, the tension between the two sides of the debate became clearer. I learned a lot about not only the issue at hand, but also deeper issues in regard to the achievement gap in Madison.

John Matthews of Madison Teachers, Inc., gave me a lot of insight into the effects of poverty on children’s academic experiences. Children that grow up in poverty don’t have the same opportunities outside of school as those from middle- and upper middle-class families. One thing Matthews mentioned was the fact that during summer vacation, children who are not in poverty go to the zoo and museums and the pool, while those in poverty are sitting on a curb just trying to pass the time. In addition, kids with opportunities tend to have more involved and encouraging families who read to them at night and help them grow academically. By the time these kids get back to school in the fall, they are at an advantage. Each year this happens, those children from lower-income families become more behind.

Another way in which children in poverty are at an academic disadvantage is lack of health care, and possibly even lack of nourishment. Kids who go home after school and don’t get a meal at night come to school the next day thinking about nothing else other than the fact that they are hungry. We all know what it’s like when your stomach can’t take it anymore, and all you can think about is your next meal. Imagine these kids living that every day; it makes sense they wouldn’t care so much about what their teacher may be discussing. The same sort of pattern happens when a child without the means to be treated for illness is sick. Advantaged children have parents who are willing and able to take them to a doctor when they don’t feel well, and generally get medication or anything else that will help with whatever they may have. Kids in poverty don’t get that, and when they come to school, again all they can think about is the pain in their stomach, or tooth, or wherever they might be hurting.

Although I found all this quite interesting, I was unfortunately unable to use a lot of this information since it was too off topic. Matthews uses this basis of information in his stance against Madison Prep, because he believes it’s going to take society as a whole, not just the school system, to change in order to solve this achievement gap issue.

All journalists – from the most experienced reporter to the burgeoning young student writer – are continuously learning, learning how to hone techniques, how to converse with sources, and how to apply journalistic ethics to foster credibility in the field. As a student just beginning this line of work, I have learned a plethora about the theoretical aspects of journalism from countless handbooks, style guides and works of great writers; however, over the course of the past semester, and especially over the last few weeks working on my story for this website, I have learned that the best way to become more skilled in the field is to practice, to apply the theoretical.

Only in that way, can a journalist become more equipped to deal with all kinds of situations, all kinds of sources, and all kinds of frustrations. I believe it is safe to say that all journalists have made a mistake at some point. I certainly already have.

But it is important to look at every project, every story a journalist writes and reports, as a new challenge and a new learning experience. Looking back on the events that unfolded while working on this story, I have gained a trifecta of important insights useful to me in future pursuits.

First, always have back-up sources in case one or two fall through shortly before deadline. If a source says he or she can answer questions sometime that week but does not schedule a specific time, find another source in the meantime even if it might involve slightly changing the angle of the story. As a student at a large university, I never had a problem gathering sources for stories limited to campus issues. Beyond the bubble is a whole different story.

Second, asking follow-up questions can be crucial and is not as scary as it may seem. After taking a half hour of a source’s time, I always felt nervous requesting follow-up information, thinking that they would be peeved that I disturbed them after they had already spoken to me. Writing this story, I realized that the sources that chose to interview with me truly care about sharing information about their schools and their thoughts for improvement, especially after finding out that the story would have a positive spin. They would be happy to answer any further questions I may have, provided it does not turn into a whole second interview. So ask away, but realize your limit.

Lastly, it was interesting to learn that everyone to whom I spoke, faculty and students, from these high schools showed care and concern for school safety and security. None thought that security procedures and punishments for school threats had become too strict, too heavy, or overboard post-Columbine. There was a consensus among the area’s high schools of the importance of school community education that reigned paramount over high-technology security equipment. It all boiled down to communication: Comfortable school climates would improve faculty-student communication, which could in turn prevent violence. As a journalist, I found it can be just as interesting to find consensus and resolution as it is to find tension and conflict.

Writing this story broadened my experience and took me out of my comfort zone. I learned that to be a good journalist, I have to be in the driver’s seat, taking control of my responsibility to produce a quality piece. I look forward to the challenging roads ahead.

I never anticipated how confusing and vague the language of education could be. While writing my feature on teacher evaluations, the research I had to do for the subject was tedious and confusing. Just on the DPI website there were contradicting forms and papers that made sorting out what had passed through the system, what was being implemented and what was still being developed really mixed up. The language is very legalese. It was vague and confusing enough to sound good without really giving the public much information. It’s probably intentional, especially with such a sensitive topic as teacher evaluations where the system really has to be right or else it can backfire on the education administration in Wisconsin.

Making sure that people know the bare minimum helps when applying for the No Child Left Behind waiver because the teacher evaluation system sounds good when described so vaguely. So the end is good, where Wisconsin would have more freedom from the strictness of NCLB, but it is not helpful for those who don’t know much about the education system.  It took me quite a while to figure out they hadn’t even completely agreed on a system to use for teacher evaluations. When I figured that out, it took me even longer to figure out how much progress they had actually made with the system.

There were no blatant contradictions, but there would be hints of them through the language used. I have no idea how beat reporters on education deal with the research part of their stories. Most of the language is bogged down by vague word choice and little detail. When I thought I had a grip on the subject, I would stumble on something else on the DPI site and would land back on square one. Fact checking my story became just as tedious as finding the actual information in the first place.  I had to check everything a couple dozen times because as soon as I would confirm something I would look at a different document that would slightly contradict that and I would have to research that document to find why that contradiction appeared. Also, poor website organization hindered my research efforts.

To be on the outside and know nothing of education makes for a difficult time. The lingo of education is complicated and just knowing all of the terms and acronyms is a feat in itself. However, if I were more education savvy I feel the whole endevour would be easier.