How We Enlisted a Community to Report on Idaho’s Crumbling Schools — ProPublica

When the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica teamed up to report on crumbling school buildings last year, we recognized that it would be a challenge to capture the attention of readers and officials.

Idaho residents already knew that their own school buildings were in bad shape and that state law made it hard for districts to raise the money to fix them. We were unsure whether additional reporting would change anything.

To have a chance at impact, we set out to do the most comprehensive possible version of the story to show that the problems were statewide. We needed to take readers into schools so they could see what was broken and the effect on students and staff in a way that wouldn’t be easy to ignore. And because we couldn’t visit every school ourselves, we needed to get people in every part of the state to help us document what was happening locally.

Through ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, we spent about nine months reporting and heard from 106 of the state’s 115 superintendents and 233 students, parents, teachers and others.

While Idaho has one of the highest thresholds for school bonds to pass, we know school facilities funding is an issue across the country. Local journalists have already done important coverage of this issue and related equity concerns. We want to share our tips and the lessons we learned doing this work so you can scale up your efforts to reach many different kinds of stakeholders in your community.

If you would like to talk about adapting some of these strategies for your reporting, email us at [email protected] and [email protected].

Step 1

Determine the reporting gaps.

If you’re new to the beat or topic, you’ll first want to figure out exactly how school funding works in your state. Some questions you might ask include: What data and public records are out there? Can we get them? And what’s missing from what already exists?

When it comes to school maintenance, you can find information through the Education Writers Association, National Council on School Facilities and your state Department of Education, as well as by talking to your local school administrators. The Education Commission of the States has a 50-state breakdown of school construction funding in different states.

In Idaho, through a records request, reporter Becca Savransky was able to get the results of every school bond election for decades from the state Department of Education. But there was a lot she couldn’t get through official channels. There hadn’t been a statewide assessment of school facilities in nearly three decades.

Schools had received inspections, but they were mostly surface level and sparse in detail, primarily focused on clear worker safety issues rather than an exhaustive facilities review. For example, Becca visited a Boundary County school where she saw buckets taped to pipes to catch leaks and heard that the maintenance director had to blow snow off the roof to prevent it from collapsing again. In comparison, the inspection report’s only reference to the roof was linking to a federal alert about preventing injury during snow removal. It also didn’t show the impact on students and staff.

The state said it would cost thousands of dollars to find and release the inspections for every school in the state, anyway, and a separate state agency denied Becca’s request for school safety reports because they could reveal security vulnerabilities.

As you figure out what’s missing from the official record, that will help you focus your large crowdsourcing efforts to help target those gaps.

Step 2

Who has the information you need? Take their temperature.

Once you’ve identified a gap, it’s time to think about who has information that can fill it. The key for a successful crowdsourcing project is finding people who care about the topic and are willing to talk. Make a list of possible stakeholders and start thinking about the concerns and opportunities that might come up as you talk with each group.

For the Idaho project, we talked with a variety of sources early on, listening for:

• Buy-in. Becca had already spoken with a number of superintendents who told her this issue needed more attention. Other sources said this was an important issue and that they were eager to share their experiences.
• Clear examples. Sources were able to provide concrete examples of problems with their school buildings. Superintendents also had information about budgets and costs and were willing to give us access to schools. Students and teachers were able to explain how these issues got in the way of learning.
• Potential barriers. We asked what might prevent someone from participating in our reporting. While we heard a variety of concerns, the good news was that our sources felt we could address them — and they were willing to help us spread the word.

Step 3

Come up with a reporting plan.

The next step is to figure out the specific materials to seek and questions to ask. We asked ourselves: If we had this information, what might we be able to say in the story? What would make it stronger? Who was best situated to give us what we were seeking? And if we received a ton of responses, how could we keep them organized and incorporate as many as possible into a story?

In Idaho, we decided we needed three things: a way to show how prevalent school disrepair was across districts; visual evidence; and material that would clearly illustrate how school conditions were affecting students, parents and staff.

We planned how we’d approach different stakeholders and tracked our outreach and what came from it. (We used Airtable, but you can use a spreadsheet or another system that works for you.)

Superintendents

We decided to create a survey to send public school district superintendents, with the goal of hearing from as close to all 115 of them as possible. We knew getting busy superintendents to respond might be hard, so we did some testing before reaching out to the whole group. We asked four superintendents in a diverse range of districts to provide feedback on the survey. We asked whether anything was missing, what might keep someone from filling it out and about the best ways to share it.

We were able to get all but nine to respond by having a group of superintendents share the survey and by doing multiple rounds of reminder calls and emails. We found it effective to share the percentage of their peers we had heard from.

Principals, teachers and other school staff

In order to reach school staff and students, both newsrooms published a callout asking people to tell us about their schools. We set up calls with groups such as the state teacher’s association to introduce our project and ask for their help to spread the word through emails, social media posts, flyers or any methods they thought might work.

We reached out to teachers when we thought the issue might be front of mind, such as when there was a heat wave, as many schools don’t have air conditioning.

We also reached out to online groups, asking moderators or administrators if we could join and post or if they would be willing to post for us.

Students

To reach students, we found that posting on Instagram and TikTok alone didn’t work. A recent graduate suggested we reach out directly to students, and we had the most success by visiting students at schools. (Read more about that below.)

Parents, community members and facilities experts

To reach others with knowledge about school buildings, we identified social media groups from those focused on a region in Idaho to those specifically for parents. We made sure to connect with groups for parents whose children had disabilities, as we knew school accessibility was a concern.

Some recommendations for reaching out over social media:

• Use a professional account (especially on Instagram) that identifies you as a journalist and shows examples of your past work.
• If you’re creating a new account, ask your audience team to give you a follow from the newsroom account to help establish your credibility.
• Make your requests clear and concise. Do you want them to fill out a callout, help you spread the word or something else?

We also reached out to associations for engineers and architects in the state.

Step 4

Look at what’s missing and adjust as you go.

Once you’ve heard from many people, it can be helpful to take a step back and evaluate what you’re getting against your initial goals. What are you missing? Who haven’t you heard from? You can and should adjust as you get more feedback.

Sometimes, you may even find that what you’ve heard from the community significantly shifts the focus of your story or your understanding of a problem. That’s a success!

When we noticed we weren’t getting many photos and videos, we emphasized it in our callout and outreach. When we heard from some teachers who said their schools were in good condition, we updated the callout to clarify that we were interested in hearing about that, too. We also heard some criticism in response to our posts on social media. We responded directly to those posts to clarify our process and invite further feedback.

Step 5

On-the-ground reporting.

Some of our best reporting happened when we went to where our sources were — in schools.

If you have limited ability to travel, you’ll want to choose your destinations carefully to help you fill gaps and capture geographic diversity. We focused on rural districts we hadn’t heard from and those where it seemed there were extreme facilities issues. We picked routes that allowed us to visit multiple schools. We visited 39 in total.

Some superintendents were eager to help us meet groups of students. Others were more wary but let us meet with a few students they selected. (You can read more about the activities we did with students in our methodology post.)

We also brought a camera that produces instant prints because we wanted to make sure we left the school visits with evidence of the problems in hand. With teacher permission, students photographed the issues they saw in their schools. We found that the photos were sometimes hard to make out. We would recommend making sure the students use flash and also having them use their cellphones to take photos, as long as teachers and administrators are OK with it. Just be sure the students share the photos with you before you leave.

Step 6

Keep sources updated.

Be sure to report back to your sources! You might not be able to use everything they shared, but hopefully the relationships you build will help fuel other stories going forward. When the governor called for making school maintenance “priority No. 1,” we reached out to sources for their response to what the Legislature was considering.

It’s an example of the way ProPublica’s engagement team thinks about how reporting and source relationships can build off each other.