SUMMER 2003
the
CHILDREN’S
BEAT
A
JOURNAL
OF
MEDIA
COVERAGE
Tales From the
Toddler Room
Fresh takes on early
childhood and preschool
WALT HARRINGTON
REPORTING
ON
ON
THE JOURNALIST’S HAIKU
GAY TEENS
THE ENVIRONMENT
AND
HIGH SCHOOL
HANGAR
IN A
CHILDREN’S HEALTH
CHILDR
the
A
5
JOURNAL
OF
MEDIA
COVERAGE
The Journalist’s Haiku
By
By Walt
Walt Harrington
Harrington
11
A Family, In Brief
By
By Régina
Régina Monfort
Monfort
15
Tales From the Toddler Room
By
By Susan
Susan Brenna
Brenna
19
Children’s Health and the Environment
By
By Bob
Bob Weinhold
Weinhold
24
When They Want to Tell
The
The challenges
challenges of
of reporting
reporting on
on gay
gay teenagers
teenagers
By
By Cara
Cara Nissman
Nissman
27
High School in the Hangar
Fighting
Fighting a
a dated
dated image,
image, tech
tech schools
schools take
take off
off
By
By Melanie
Melanie D.G.
D.G. Kaplan
Kaplan
30
This Just In
SUMMER 2003
REN’S
BEAT
Vol. 10, No. 3
The Children’s Beat: A Journal of Media Coverage
(ISSN: 1536187X) is published quarterly by the Casey
Journalism Center on Children and Families, a
national resource for professional journalists and a
program of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at
the University of Maryland and the University of
Maryland Foundation. CJC is funded by the Annie E.
Casey Foundation and The David and Lucile Packard
Foundation. Periodicals postage paid at College Park,
Md. Postmaster: Send change of address to CJC,
4321 Hartwick Rd. Suite 320, College Park, MD 20740.
CJC Staff
Beth Frerking, director
Patrice Pascual, deputy director and editor,
The Children’s Beat
Jennifer Moore, research director
Betty Pearce, administrative director
Alice Bishop, administrative assistant
Patricia Edmonds, editor at large
CJC Advisory Board
Chairwoman: Laura Sessions Stepp
The Washington Post
Maureen Bunyan, WJLA-TV
Patty Fisher, San Jose Mercury News
Jon Franklin, Philip Merrill College of Journalism,
University of Maryland
Jeffrey Katz, National Public Radio
David Lawrence Jr., The Early Childhood
Initiative Foundation
Craig Matsuda, Los Angeles Times
Alfred Peréz, Pew Commission on Children in
Foster Care, Georgetown University
Gene Roberts, Philip Merrill College of Journalism,
University of Maryland
Tonda F. Rush, American Press Works
Celeste Williams, The Indianapolis Star
Judy Woodruff, CNN
Magazine design: Sese-Paul Design
Cover: Preschooler Mallory Eichler at the Ohio School
for the Deaf.
Bobby’s room, Des Moines, 1999.
From “A Family, In Brief,” by Régina Monfort
( A P P H O T O / T E RY G I L L I A M )
Casey Journalism Center on
Children and Families
4321 Hartwick Road, Suite 320
College Park, MD 20740
Ph: 301-699-5133
E-mail: info@casey.umd.edu
Web: www.casey.umd.edu
Leave It to the Experts
BY BETH FRERKING
T Y RO N E T U R N E R
DIRECTOR, CASEY JOURNALISM CENTER
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ast year, a former colleague – let’s call
her Jane – sent her 3-year-old
daughter to an accredited, selective
preschool outside of Washington, D.C.,
where parents assist teachers in the classroom.The school prided itself on a
“non-coercive” approach to child-rearing.
Instead of saying “no,” parents were
strongly advised to talk to their children
about appropriate choices. Presented with consequences, the
experts said, children usually chose the right path.
That may work in the sandbox, but on one bright May
morning, academic theory ran smack into practice with two
wandering preschoolers and a very pregnant Jane. Along for a
class walk, Jane suddenly was faced with two fleet 3-year-olds
racing off in a V – and both headed toward a busy street.
Pregnant or not, Jane couldn’t catch them. So, feet planted
firmly in place, she called out in a loud – and, yes, coercive –
voice for the children to come back. It took a nanosecond for
her to ditch the “choices” approach. (She could just picture
herself explaining to the parents that well, she was sorry their
children had been mowed down by a bus, but that had been their
decision.) And, in the manner of most children who hear an “I
mean business” voice, the tiny truants returned to the group.
Incredibly, after that jarring incident, a teacher reprimanded
Jane. “She told me I didn’t handle it correctly, that I should not
have yelled at the children, that they’re very sensitive,” she
recalls. Jane countered that she didn’t make a habit of yelling at
children, but the teacher didn’t buy it. “You should have run
after them,” she said. “You should have picked the one you had
the best shot of catching” and then called for another parent’s
help in corralling the other.
Well, that’s one perspective, but it sure wasn’t Jane’s, who has
pulled her daughter from the school. Her story neatly illustrates
the gulf that so often separates theory and reality in parenting,
one we in the media don’t always help bridge. In covering child
and family issues, we’re inclined to trumpet academic studies
and feature credentialed parenting experts. But the most
revealing stories aren’t in the guidebooks; they’re in how parents
apply expert advice – if they do – and how guilty (or unconcerned) they feel when they don’t.
Take the recent release of two new child-care studies, guaranteed to seed even more self-doubt among parents. One, from
the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development, found that some children became more aggressive and defiant the longer they spent in child care. A second,
from the University of Minnesota, discovered that children’s
levels of cortisol, a stress-marking hormone, rose with more
hours in care, and that shy children had the highest levels of all.
L
We’ve heard some of this before. In April 2001, NICHD
researchers released similar findings on aggression, sparking an
explosion of media coverage.This time around, the editors of
Child Development, which published the studies, took extraordinary steps to provide context by offering nine commentaries
from other authors.While raising important points, they perhaps
had the unintentional effect of making readers wonder exactly
what they should believe.
News coverage of the studies wasn’t exactly edifying either.
As is often the case with such “official” reports, journalists who
covered the story primarily quoted experts with academic titles
preceding their names.
Rare was the story that featured ordinary parents living the
life. Choosing the child care.Worrying about the child care.
Worrying about work. Running late to both. Loving the child
and the job. Feeling guilty about each. Loving the babysitter,
hating the babysitter, feeling pathetically grateful for the
babysitter – sometimes all in one day. And then – and when’s
the last time you saw this in a story on child care? – feeling
inestimably proud as your child waves happily from the
morning reading circle, neither damaged nor hysterical as you
leave for work.
This is why novels – take Allison Pearson’s “I Don’t Know
How She Does It,” a hilarious tale of one British mom’s
attempt to juggle job and family – often provide the truest
reflections of the joys and angst, losses and victories, of caring
for family while working outside the home. It’s a mixed bag for
most families, and as journalists, we’re not always at our best
covering ambiguity.
Yet that’s what almost any parenting issue involves:
Imperfection and trade-offs. Often, it isn’t as simple as following
the results of a national study. Surely, parents would prefer highquality child care recommended by researchers. But maybe that
care doesn’t exist where they live, or is too expensive or inconvenient. And if someone’s job literally depends on their child
care – and the care falls well short of ideal standards – well, can
we blame them for tuning us out?
Theirs are the stories we should tell. Academic studies can
provide a springboard for discussion, whether we’re reporting
on how families choose child care, select schools and set limits
on their child’s television viewing. But the meat on the bone
should come from parents like Jane, people striving every day to
successfully raise families as they wade through an unending
stream of official how-to’s.
After all, they’re the real experts.
bfrerking@casey.umd.edu
“Nighthawks” by Edward Hopper
F R I E N D S O F A M E R I C A N A RT C O L L E C T I O N , R E P RO D U C T I O N , T H E A RT I N S T I T U T E O F C H I C A G O.
The Journalist’s Haiku
Tips for writing short, evocative stories
that readers remember
B Y WA LT H A R R I N G T O N
for The Washington Post Magazine, I harassed, charmed and guilt-tripped my
editors into letting me write longer and longer stories. I once wrote a 75,000-
T H E
cannot exhaust a subject but you can exhaust a reader.”
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word series on local hospital politics, after which a wise friend said, “Walt, you
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
Unchastened, I wrote 7,200 words on
how the poet laureate of the United
States composed a 23-line poem. I wrote
at least that much on the life of a
happily married couple, a high-school
genius and a homicide cop, as well as
many other long stories on equally
obscure people and arcane topics.
I was among the early newspaper
converts to the ways and means of what
has come to be known as “Narrative
Journalism”– variously called plain old
feature writing, then New Journalism,
then Literary Journalism. By any name,
the movement has changed the journalistic landscape by spotlighting in-depth
reporting and requiring hefty wordcounts. It frees reporters to capture the
rich human dramas that underlie the
child and family beat. It has been a
S U M M E R
I’m guiltier than most. For 20 years as a reporter for small newspapers and then
5
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powerful antidote to those who believe
busy readers want shorter and shorter
articles, and our annual journalism
awards – including the Casey Journalism
Center’s – are replete with comprehensive, well-written and long stories.
But, as the old adage goes, “Be careful
what you wish for.” Because while we’ve
gotten better at telling the big narratives,
I fear we are no better – maybe even
worse – at telling such stories writ short.
Two decades ago, when I was an assignment editor on the Metro staff of The
Washington Post, the deputy Metro editor
was David Maraniss, who went on to
win a Pulitzer Prize and write bestselling biographies of Bill Clinton and
Vince Lombardi. Every once in awhile,
he’d pull me aside and say, “We need to
get a tone poem in the paper.” By that,
he meant a story that was short and
sweet and evocative, one that made
readers feel what it was like to be a
school teacher, coal miner, high school
jock, farmer.To use literary analogies,
Maraniss didn’t want a novel but a short
story, not an epic poem but a sonnet. He
wanted a journalistic haiku.
I wonder why every paper doesn’t
have one on its front page every day.
Such stories – about 1,000 words long –
can be done in one to a few days of
reporting and writing.They don’t take
much space.They are perfect for photo
tie-ins.They offer reporters a chance to
use the basic techniques of narrative
journalism and to stretch their writing
skills, which spills over to improve their
next assignment.The stories are journalistic mirrors held up to the lives of
ordinary readers, in turn touching,
compelling, funny.When done with
sophistication, they aren’t just slice-oflife brighteners but ethnographic
affirmation of how our readers live and
what they value. Day in and day out,
these stories add up to a documentary
record in the way that the Dust Bowlera, black-and-white images of Dorothea
Lange – laid out one stop-frame at a
time – are a profound human chronicle.
Tone poems distill the assumptions
and techniques of longer works of narrative journalism – immersion reporting,
contemporaneous action, dialogue and
narration, character, sensory detail and
theme – and apply them in more
concise fashion.They convey what the
early documentary writers called “the
feeling of a living experience,” and draw
on decades of example and advice, from
Tom Wolfe’s influential essays in “The
New Journalism” to books by Jon
Franklin, Norman Sims and Mark
Kramer, Patsy Sims and myself.These
collections give more tips than I can talk
about in an article, and I recommend
you read them.
Narrative journalism stories share
several basic elements.
Use real action as the story’s spine.
This is often the hardest rule to follow.
We are so used to feature stories being
collections of quotes and anecdotes that
we don’t even realize that we are not
actually taking our readers to the place
and setting of our stories. Narrative journalism requires authors to immerse
themselves in the worlds of the people
they are writing about:To experience
routine events in a subject’s life in real
time, to capture real dialogue. It creates a
natural timeline that gives a story
dramatic arc and structure, and often
introduces an element of suspense as
events unfold. It generates a richness of
documentary detail or “color.” In almost
every case, with thoughtful reporting, the
action comes to reflect and reveal the
story’s themes. On big projects, immersion can last weeks, months or years. For
tone poems, it can last a few hours to a
day or two.
Journalists often argue that many
stories can’t be reported through immersion. Indeed, many are reconstructions of
events that have already happened.Yet if
you are determined to find ways to tell
traditional features through immersion, a
myriad of reporting methods will
suddenly emerge. If you want to do a
story on a well-known local spelunker,
for instance, you can interview the
person and write the story, or you can
arrange an early-morning cave crawl
with your subject. If you want to write
about a man who runs the local horse
barns and births all the spring foals, have
him call you at 3 a.m. when a mare goes
into labor and be there when the foal is
born. If you want to write about an all-
night diner that is local landmark, you
can sit down on a stool at 8 p.m. and stay
there until 8 a.m., taking in the action,
scene, dialogue, setting and drama that
unfolds naturally. I know these stories
will work, because they were all done by
my University of Illinois journalism
students. Here’s how Karen Balsley began
her tone poem on the diner:
“All night they come to Merry-Ann’s
Diner, with its insistent glow shining out
through the windows and its weak
coffee, chipped brown mugs, hash
browns, fried eggs, burgers and company.
The grease might fill the air and the
food, but before long it’s no longer
noticed. It blends with the buzz of fluorescent lights, the mismatched silverware,
and the dull beige paint that covers the
walls and tabletops.... A few minutes
before midnight, 45-year-old waitress
Barb Reifsteck squeezes past the cook,
Curtis McGhee, who is leaning on the
counter talking to Liz, a regular.
“ ‘What’s this with you keep getting
in my way?’ Barb chides Curtis playfully.
“ ‘Don’t touch my butt,’ Curtis says,
‘ ‘cause being groped by an elderly
woman is not cute.’ Liz laughs at the
nonsense.... She’s an anthropology major,
and she knows she can apply that craft at
Merry-Ann’s.... It is a living version of
Edward Hopper’s painting ‘Nighthawks,’
in which a small but unlikely group has
gathered on a late night to sit at the
counter of a white-capped soda jerk.”
The story goes on through that
particular night with banter and a cast of
characters coming and going – drunken
college kids, cops, an Elvis look-a-like.
All the while, Barb the white waitress,
Curtis the black cook, and Liz the
middle-class college kid go back and
forth about God, race, evolution and the
meaning of life, amid the scratching of
Curtis’s spatula on the grill and the
serving of plate after plate of greasy
diner fare. It is an entertaining story of
local interest, evoking the richness of the
place, capturing the arc of a typical
evening’s action, and buttressing Balsley’s
theme that Merry-Ann’s is a social
melting pot by revealing the unlikely
friendship that has emerged between
Curtis and Barb.
All in about 1,000 words.
“The moon was nearly full, and you could see far up
the trail, and even partway across the valley below.
Dead men had been coming down the mountain all
evening, lashed onto the backs of mules.”
– Ernie Pyle
Aim to write a “true short story.”
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Way back in 1944, the famous World
War II correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote
“The Story of Captain Waskow,” an 800word account of how U.S. soldiers on
the battlefield reacted to the death of
Henry T.Waskow. Decades before
anybody was talking about making journalism stories read like short fiction, Pyle
crafted an article that had the unmistakable feel of an Ernest Hemingway story:
“I was at the foot of the mule trail the
night they brought Captain Waskow
down.The moon was nearly full, and
you could see far up the trail, and even
partway across the valley below. Dead
men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of
mules.They came lying belly-down
across the wooden pack-saddles, their
heads hanging down on one side, their
stiffened legs sticking out awkwardly
from the other, bobbing up and down as
the mules walked.”
Pyle’s story is a real-time description
– complete with overheard dialogue,
scenic detail and timeline action – of
how men responded to the arrival of the
bodies of Captain Waskow and four
others. It evokes the men’s humanity and
brave resignation. It ends: “The rest of us
went back into the cowshed leaving the
five dead men lying in a line end to end
in the shadow of the low stone wall.We
lay down on the straw in the cowshed,
and pretty soon we were all asleep.”
In other words, narrative journalism’s
efforts to make articles feel more storylike while maintaining documentary
accuracy aren’t exactly a news flash. John
Hersey, writing his famous 1946 New
Yorker article, “Hiroshima,” consciously
modeled his story on novelist Thornton
Wilder’s “Bridge of San Luis Rey.” In
the early ’50s, Lillian Ross was writing
her influential New Yorker profile of
Hemingway and her piece about the
making of John Huston’s “The Red
Badge of Courage.” Her articles were
scenic, real-time stories based on immersion reporting. By the ’60s, journalist
Gay Talese was consciously modeling his
journalism on the scene-by-scene
construction of fiction, and Tom Wolfe
was arguing that scenic detail, immersion
reporting, the use of overheard dialogue
and “status” detail (small documentary
facts that reveal a person’s social status)
were creating a whole new form of
journalistic literature.
In 1986, two-time Pulitzer Prizewinner Jon Franklin in his book,
“Writing for Story,” formulated a simple
model for newspaper journalists who
wanted to write what he called a “true
short story.” Besides grounding stories in
on-going action, Franklin suggested
borrowing the short story structure of
fiction in which the action creates a
complication for the main character that
must be resolved by the end of the story,
bringing a change in the head or heart
of the character.
Franklin’s Pulitzer-winning article,
“Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” about a surgeon
operating on an essentially inoperable
brain tumor, was a masterpiece of the
approach. Dr.Thomas Ducker eats his
wife’s waffles for breakfast, picks up his
bagged lunch containing a peanut butter
sandwich, goes to the hospital, operates
on Mrs. Kelly for six hours, fails in his
efforts to remove the tumor, lays out his
lunch on a table in the hospital waiting
room, and bites into his sandwich,
knowing that Mrs. Kelly will soon die.
The story is about physician as failed
God who must live every day with the
consequences of his inadequacy. It ran
about 2,000 words in Baltimore’s Evening
Sun and took Franklin four days to
report and write.
Of course, reality doesn’t always
cooperate with us, and action doesn’t
always bring neat closure to our stories.
Yet insisting that we constantly be on
the lookout for circles of meaning in our
stories will help us better see them. A
student of mine,Ted Kemp, once wrote a
story about a hog farmer who was the
third generation in his family to run the
farm. But his sons weren’t interested in
hog farming, and the man was resigned
to eventually closing his operation.
Kemp, who consciously modeled his
story on Franklin’s suggestions, grounded
it in all the wonderful action, scene and
detail of the man working on his farm.
Obviously, the farmer didn’t shut down
his operation in the few days Kemp
spent with him.Yet Kemp used real-life
details to evoke the point. For instance,
the story started off in the morning with
an expectant sow who was late giving
birth.That night, after a grueling day, the
farmer made a last stop at his barn and
discovered the piglets just then wiggling
forth – a moment of joy that justified
the man’s hard labor and also an example
of the small pleasures his sons would
miss, a moment of palpable loss that
helped bring thematic closure to the
story.
Always remember that the requirements of “true” in “true short story”
must come before the dramatic needs of
“short story.”We are documentarians
using narrative devices to make our
stories more compelling. Nothing can be
made up – not a quote or a scene, of
course, but also not the sound of
thunder in the background, the direction
of the wind, the crackle of gravel underfoot, sunlight glinting off the car hood,
an odd gesture of the hand.
True means true.
7
Digression is our friend.
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Mark Kramer, journalist, author and now
the director of the Nieman Foundation
Program on Narrative Journalism at
Harvard, in his co-edited book “Literary
Journalism,” enshrines digression as a
central device in these stories.
Contemporaneous action as a story’s
narrative spine creates grounded movement, but almost all stories require the
addition of background information:
where people grew up, ages, relevant
personal histories, the nut graph or
theme-setting material akin to
comparing Merry-Ann’s Diner to
Hopper’s famous painting. Such material
must be delivered to readers seamlessly,
in what Kramer calls digression from the
“moving now.” Background must be
given in small enough dollops that
readers don’t lose track of the story.
Mike Sager is a writer for Esquire
magazine.Yet back in 1981, he was a 25year-old Washington Post Metro reporter
who wanted to be Tom Wolfe someday. I
was his editor.When it came time to do
the annual autumn story about the
turning of the leaves along rural
Virginia’s Skyline Drive, Sager came up
with a fresh way to tell the metaphorical
tale of winter descending upon us. He
visited a farmer in Bay Island,Va., who
was getting his farm ready for winter.
The 1,100-word story began:
“The dawn is chill inside the barn,
and Greg Smith’s breath hangs in the air
like puffs from a hand-rolled smoke. A
Holstein stands motionless before him,
and he strokes the cow’s black and white
face with a rough, stained hand. A few
steps away, the sun outlines the open
barn door on the earth, and there
summer lingers, warm to the skin.”
Sager journeyed with Greg Smith as
he checked the moisture of his corn
silage, fed and milked his dairy cows,
replaced a fuel pump and a tractor belt,
unsuccessfully tossed his hat at a dowel on
the wall inside his house and ate
hamburgers prepared for lunch by his
wife, Doris, who was spooning homemade
peach cobbler with seven other women
while on break from their fall farm-wife
duties of airing out electric blankets,
caulking windows and cleaning fireplace
flues.Although Sager’s story was rooted in
the details of his setting and the timeline
of a day on the farm, most of the story
was hidden in digression – that the family
owns 1,112 acres and five 60-foot silos;
that last year’s harvest was poor and their
750 head of cattle barely had enough feed
for the winter; that Smith employs five
hired hands and works 15-hour days; that
he believes in God; and that Doris has
already put up hundreds of cans and jars
of peas, lima beans, corn, tomatoes, jellies
and pickles for the winter.
This ode to the unending cycle of
the seasons took a day and a half of
reporting and a day and a half of
writing. It was eventually collected in
“Writing Literary Features,” edited by
R.Thomas Berner, who was particularly
interested in Sager’s skillful use of digression. Sager told Berner, “I try to advance
a few steps forward, take a step back for
history, clarification or a relevant aside,
and then proceed onward. In this way,
the readers are spiraled into the story, as
they would be in a short story or novel.”
More than 20 years ago – in the tradition of Wolfe, Franklin and others – the
now distinguished literary journalist
Mike Sager was already unraveling how
to write a “true short story.”
Report through all your senses.
As reporters, we rely far too much on
what we see and hear. Read natural
fiction, and you’ll find tastes and smells
and wind on the skin. I was reading one
of James Lee Burke’s mysteries the other
day, and marveled at his descriptions of
how just about everything in Louisiana
smells. Sensory reporting is crucial to all
fine storytelling.
Use particularity of detail.
I knew a man who knew a man who
once stayed up late playing the 1923 hit
song “Yes,We Have No Bananas!”The
man did so, he said, because he wanted
to know that at least once in his lifetime
he had done something nobody else in
the universe was doing at the same time.
In teaching narrative journalism, we tell
reporters to collect telling details. It’s a
variation on Wolfe’s call for “status”
details: cowboy hat versus White Sox
cap, Ethan Allan versus IKEA, Jane
Austen versus Tom Clancy.Yet such
particularity of detail does more than
root subjects in the social order. If Joe
Blow hangs up his White Sox cap and
moves the Jane Austen novel off the
cushion so he can sit down on his Ethan
Allan sofa, you have taken readers to a
place that exists only at that crease in the
universe – a “Yes,We Have No
Bananas!” moment of total particularity.
Take charge as the narrator.
We have this idea in newspaper journalism
that stories are supposed to tell themselves
through the way we lay out the facts.We
pretend this because it fits our mythology
of objective newspaper journalism.Yet
stories don’t tell themselves. Mike Sager
wasn’t writing Greg Smith’s story. He was
writing Mike Sager’s version of Greg
Smith’s story. Get used to it.Take the
authority to write lines such as these:
“The verdant countryside is fading, and
the smell of mature Grimes Golden and
Yellow Delicious apples hangs in the
crystal air.The sun is round and low, and
the light splashes now across the fields
more like a spreading coat of varnish than
summer’s sheer garment of translucent
silk. Soon, the cows will linger in the
barn, favoring the warmth of their extra
winter issue of straw and sawdust over the
cool grass by the pond, shadowed in the
afternoon by Mount Pony.”
Have the nerve to make stories your
own.
An idea is worth a thousand details.
If a story isn’t animated by an idea, it will
fall flat. I once knew a fiction writer who
told me she could describe the cracks in
the sidewalk so vividly they would rise
up and slap you in the face.Yet that
wasn’t enough, she said, because there
had to be a reason for the cracks to rise
up and slap you in the face. After
teaching the methods of literary journalism to college students for the last
seven years, I’ve decided this is the
hardest of all to teach. I can get students
to immerse themselves in, say, the life of a
hospice nurse, shadow the woman
through time and events, gather telling
details and dialogue, and then write the
story in scenes with a particularity of
detail. It’s much harder to get students to
distill out from all that labor the idea that
“These stories add up
to a documentary
record in the way that
the Dust Bowl era,
black-and-white
images of Dorothea
Lange are a profound
human chronicle.”
“Roadside Family,” 1938
C O P Y R I G H T O F T H E D O RO T H E A L A N G E C O L L E C T I O N , O A K L A N D M U S E U M O F C A L I F O R N I A , C I T Y O F O A K L A N D. G I F T O F PAU L S . TAY L O R .
Stories, stories everywhere.
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
If you don’t have a million ideas, you
don’t get it. Over the years, my college
students have done articles on a deer
hunter in the field, the city’s best piano
tuner, a garbage man, a janitor, a smalltime musician-songwriter, a custom
guitar maker, a country vet, a beautician,
an old couple still in love after 60 years,
a priest giving communion, a pastry
chef, a high school football game, a landscape photographer, Ida’s Pub, a woman
auto mechanic, a fraternity stud, a farm
wife, a bull rider, a comedian. All were
mini-narratives done with immersion
reporting, action, time-line, scene,
dialogue and sensory detail.
And these were college kids!
T H E
Years ago, I edited a story for The
Washington Post Magazine about the
then-aged Florida congressman Claude
Pepper. It was assigned as a full profile of
the man’s life.
At one point, reporter Pete Early was
sitting with Pepper at his dining room
table when Pepper began to talk about
his dead wife and how his great regret
was that he had never told her goodbye
war between doctor and monster.
Monster wins. Patient dies. Doctor goes
on. End of insight. End of story.
The poet Rita Dove once told me
that writing a short poem was like
looking down an old-fashioned well. In
other words, to go deep in few words
requires a narrow shaft of inquiry.That’s
what we are aiming for in a journalistic
tone poem: A narrow world made wide.
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In 1,000 words, less must always
be more.
before she died, because he couldn’t bear
the thought of losing her. He talked
about how at night he sat down on her
bed and talked to her still, and how very,
very lonely he was without her. All that
was in the story, along with thousands of
words about Pepper’s life and career.Yet
when I read the article in the magazine,
I realized I had failed my reporter.The
truly powerful story was in the simple
moments of Pepper’s revealed humanity,
the inevitable truth that no matter how
accomplished a person is, he ends up old
and decrepit, sitting on the bed, talking
to his dead wife.
The power of Jon Franklin’s “Mrs.
Kelly’s Monster” grew from less is more.
Franklin told us nothing of where Dr.
Ducker grew up, went to college, why
he wanted to be a surgeon, if he was first
or 10th in his med school class. No
quotes from other surgeons to establish
his credentials. No stats on how many
brain surgeries are done each year in
America. Almost nothing about Mrs.
Kelly, the patient.The story is so
powerful exactly because it isn’t watered
down by the accepted informational
formalities of journalism. It is about a
S U M M E R
binds the material into a story.The
hospice nurse story was a wonderful
exception, because my student, Archana
Reddy, saw through the fog of technique
and realized her story really was about
how constantly dealing with death had
made the hospice nurse appreciate life all
the more. A simple idea, even an obvious
one.Yet without that idea, the story is all
sidewalk cracks slapping you in the face.
A memorable story about a hospice
nurse, all-night diner, farmer, brain
surgeon or dead soldier is always about
an idea – love of life, a social melting pot,
the balance of change and constancy,
limited human reach, brave resolve.
9
“The dawn is chill inside the barn, and Greg
Smith’s breath hangs in the air like puffs from a
hand-rolled smoke. A Holstein stands motionless
before him, and he strokes the cow’s black and
white face with a rough, stained hand.”
– Mike Sager
Many good articles just don’t demand
full-blown narratives.
S U M M E R
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T H E
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
10
In the preface to fiction writer David
James Duncan’s collection of short
sketches about his life, the author says,
“There are many things worth telling
that are not quite narrative.” How true.
Like an artist, we can sketch the equivalent of a pencil drawing of a dancing
woman. Like a photographer, we can
create the equivalent of a single image of
a sleeping baby. Like a poet, we can look
down a deep well and make a narrow
world wide, which is just what Des
Moines Register reporter Ken Fuson once
did on the first warm day of the year.
Under the title “Ah,What a Day!”:
“Here’s how Iowa celebrates a 70-degree
day in the middle of March: By washing
the car and scooping the loop and taking
a walk; by daydreaming in school and
playing hooky at work and shutting off
the furnace at home; by skateboarding
and flying kites and digging through
closets for baseball gloves; by riding that
new bike you got for Christmas and
drawing hopscotch boxes in chalk on the
sidewalk and not caring if the kids lost
their mittens again; by looking for robins
and noticing swimsuits on department
store mannequins and shooting hoops in
the park; by sticking the ice scraper in
the trunk and antifreeze in the garage
and leaving the car parked outside
overnight; by cleaning the barbecue and
stuffing the parka in storage and just
standing outside and letting that friendly
sun kiss your face; by wondering where
you’re going to go on summer vacation
and getting reacquainted with neighbors
on the front porch and telling the boys
that – yes! yes! – they can run outside
and play without a jacket; by holding
hands with a lover and jogging in shorts
and picking up the extra branches in the
yard; by eating an ice cream cone outside
and (if you’re a farmer or gardener)
feeling that first twinge that says it’s time
to plant and (if you’re a high school
senior) feeling that first twinge that says
it’s time to leave; by wondering if in all
of history there has ever been a day so
glorious and concluding that there hasn’t
and being afraid to even stop and take a
breath (or begin a new paragraph) for
fear that winter would return, leaving
Wednesday in our memory as nothing
more than a sweet and too-short dream.”
Now that’s a tone poem. One paragraph, 290 words.
It ran on the front page. And everybody in Des Moines that day was better
off for it.
Walt Harrington
is a former staff
writer for The
Washington Post
Magazine. He is
the author of
“Intimate
Journalism: The
Art and Craft of
Reporting
Everyday Life” and “The Everlasting
Stream: A True Story of Rabbits,
Guns, Friendship, and Family.” He
teaches narrative journalism at the
University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. wharring@uiuc.edu
Reading for Story
Jon Franklin’s “Writing for Story”
Walt Harrington’s “Intimate Journalism”
Norman Sims’ and Mark Kramer’s “Literary Journalism”
Patsy Sims’ “Literary Nonfiction”
Tom Wolfe’s “The New Journalism”
Short-form narrative
Jimmy Breslin’s “The World According to Jimmy Breslin.” His
columns are often true short stories.
The New Yorker’s “The Talk of the Town” with its wonderfully succinct vignettes. Often too oh-so, oh-so for newspapers,
but the form is still instructive.
“Essays of E.B.White” Short, personal pieces often rooted in
his ordinary life that illustrate how very little can be made into
plenty.
The Washington Post Magazine’s now-defunct column “Real
Time,” which evoked narrow scenes of everyday Washington
life – baffled Wisconsin tourists viewing modern art at the
National Gallery, workers changing a 15,000-watt IMAX
projection bulb in a movie theater, a paraplegic man getting out
of bed, showering and dressing for the day.
“Writing Literary Features,” edited by R.Thomas Berner
—Walt Harrington
A Family,
In Brief
Photography and
captions by
Régina Monfort
After five years of photographing
teenagers in a Latin enclave of
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, freelancer Régina Monfort had a
Macey and Trish
A L L P H O T O S © R É G I N A M O N F O RT
spectacular portfolio. Curators
were interested, exhibitions were
underway.
Still, she felt the need to leave
ikki drew me in. A heavyset girl with dramatic eyes, she stood out in
the empowerment class for at-risk teens at Des Moines’ North High
School. Anyone could see the hardship on her sweet face. Almost right
away, she wanted me to see where she lived. It wasn’t with her parents – that had
failed long before. She lived with the Longs, a brood of eight housed in a section
of northeast Des Moines. Her friend Trish – 15, and with troubles of her own –
had convinced her parents to shelter Nikki.
N
familiar grounds. So Monfort, a
French immigrant, gave herself a
Trish Long shared her room with Nikki and another friend, Macey, who had ran
away from her parents.The girls had tagged the walls of Trish’s room. Shortly after
I took this picture, Nikki took off. I didn’t see her again.
brief assignment and headed to
America’s Heartland. In
November 1999, she dropped into
S U M M E R
North High School in Des Moines
to make portraits of students, an
ethnographic study of sorts. She
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had made hundred of shots in
T H E
Brooklyn; could she also distill
C H I L D R E N ’ S
compelling images of people she
had barely met?
B E A T
Nikki, Macey and Trish (clockwise from top)
11
There was so much activity in that house,
a different tableau from room to room.When
I arrived,Trish’s mother, Ranae, was laying
on the couch, resting for her nighttime shift
at Hardee’s restaurant, where she worked
as a cook.
A short time later,Trish was left in charge of
the younger kids, including Deborah, 3.
Her 16-year-old brother Bobby was in the
next room.
S U M M E R
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T H E
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
12
The walls throbbed with the sound of
punk music blasting in Bobby’s room.
His two friends seemed oblivious to
my presence.
S U M M E R
2 0 0 3
T H E
C H I L D R E N ’ S
Bobby wasn’t so reticent. When I asked him to share something important, he
reached for a photograph of himself in uniform. A year earlier, he had been a
member of the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps of the Marines.
B E A T
13
Trish told me that her father’s job kept him away from
home, sometimes for 10 days at a time. When I stopped by
on Saturday morning, Stanley Long was feeding his
younger children breakfast. A man in his late 30s, he
looked much older.
S U M M E R
2 0 0 3
T H E
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
14
“I work for Murphy Family Farms, we travel
all over Iowa building concrete livestock barns,”
he told me. “It is hard work, and my employer
doesn’t carry any health insurance. I receive a
daily stipend of $30 that must cover my motel
and food.We are a crew of five men, so we all
pitch in for a room that we share.”
He and Ranea lost everything when their
last apartment burned down. But life’s never
been easy. He’s from a family of eight children,
and his own father died when he was 6. He
knows it’s hard for older kids to keep the
younger ones in line.
“In the summer I’m only at home four to
six days a month,” Stanley continued. “Trish
gets stressed out about it, and last night she was
sent to juvenile hall.There were just too many
kids in the house. Macey pulled in with 15
Mexican boys who decided to fight Nikki and
Patricia….
“No matter what you try to do kids are still
going to do whatever they please. I can only
guide them.Trish got kicked out of North
High School for poor attendance. She was once
on the swim team.The school took her back
and gave her probably a half a dozen chances.
Now she goes to an alternative school.
“I tell my kids that they need education, to
get some stability in their lives. I tell them I
don’t want them to be a ditch digger like me.
At the end of the day I can’t stand up straight, I
don’t want them to go through this.To me
being financially secure would mean to live the
American Dream. I would say that what we
have is pretty modest. I am not even sure
modest is the right word.”
When I went back to New York, I tried to
reach the Longs.They were gone, and I could
never trace them. I wanted to give them these
photographs. Our encounter was so brief, and
they had shared so much.
Régina Monfort would like to hear from
writers who are interested in collaborations. See more of her work at
www.reginamonfort.com.
reinemonfort@earthlink.net
A P P H O T O / T H E S AG I N AW N E W S , M E L A N I E S O C H A N
Tales From the
Toddler Room
Finding fresh takes on early childhood and preschool
As a new school year approaches, we
asked some of the experts who have the
broadest, most informed views of early
education in this country, to put themselves in the role of local reporters.What
could be this school year’s most
compelling stories?
BY SUSAN BRENNA
Are preschool teachers trained to
handle “a handful”?
vigorous legislative debate over financing of preschool programs in light of
tumbling tax revenues. While some foundations, their resources drained by
market losses, backed away from pre-K initiatives, others fueled campaigns
became the object of Bush administration attempts to shift its focus more
Start administrators argued that services were in danger of being diluted.
Over every development hung the question that educators, social scientists,
corporate chiefs and parents keep turning over: Do children need preschool
to succeed?
C H I L D R E N ’ S
toward literacy, and its control from the federal government to states. Head
T H E
nation’s signature program for educating low-income young children,
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at the local and state level to mandate universal preschool. Head Start, the
B E A T
Jack P. Shonkoff suggests reporters
look into whether early childhood
programs are equipped to help children
with significant behavioral and
emotional problems. Count the number
of children who are being expelled from
preschool, he says, and explore “the rise
in the numbers of prescriptions for stimulants and anti-depressants for very
young children.”
Shonkoff, dean of the Heller School
for Social Policy and Management at
Brandeis University, co-authored the
influential 2000 federal report, From
Neurons to Neighborhoods:The Science of
Early Childhood Development.
Journalists should find a link
between children’s behavioral problems
and insufficient training of early childhood teachers in fostering their social
and emotional development, Shonkoff
S U M M E R
It’s been a juicy news year for early childhood education. Several states saw
15
“In the ’90s, you had the National Education Goals
Panel saying one of three kids is not ready for school.
According to No Child Left Behind, one in three kids
isn’t ready for school. Billions of dollars are being
invested in early childhood and other programs, and if
the numbers aren’t shifting, there is something fundamentally flawed in how that money is being spent.”
S U M M E R
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T H E
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
16
says. “These problems need to be
addressed by sophisticated preschool
people who have training and education
in this area, not someone who goes in
there and tries to do her best by the
seat of her pants.”
When it comes to helping young
children with social and emotional difficulties, he sees “a huge gap between the
available science and knowledge, and
how we are using it…. A lot of families
and a huge percentage of our early
childhood programs don’t have access to
that expertise.”
In addition to being a public service,
such stories could be “interesting and
jazzy. People get all worked up about
medicating young kids, the early roots of
social behavior, and how to get kids
interested in school.”
Why go to preschool?
Kristie Kauerz, program director of
Early Learning for the Education
Commission of the States, questions
whether local policymakers have clear
ideas about the point of their programs.
“What’s the public good inherent in an
early childhood education system? Is it
about school readiness, or is it about
workforce development and allowing
lots more parents to be employed fulltime outside the home?”
She suggests journalists examine how
No Child Left Behind, the Bush administration’s education reform program, is
affecting preschools. She knows that
many preschool educators – and not just
in Head Start – worry that the emphasis
at the federal level on literacy and math
“will trickle down, and soon we will be
putting 3- and 4-year-olds in chairs to
test them once a year.We in the field
need to be pro-active,” Kauerz says.
“This is an opportunity for us to be
really clear and intentional about the
importance of the social and emotional
growth children are attaining.”
Kauerz suggests that reporters
research whether the word on school
readiness is reaching parents who keep
their young children at home. “How do
you get to parents across all socioeconomic sectors? Those who stay home
with their kids probably need the same
sorts of information that parents of
preschoolers do.”
If preschoolers should be tested,
how? And what does current testing
reveal?
Sharon Lynn Kagan says, “the biggest
issue parents and teachers are concerned
about is how we are assessing and
testing young kids. … It’s profuse, and
some of it is being pressed by federal
mandates, as in Head Start, and some of
it is being advanced because all the
states are required to meet certain standards.What the tests are really drives the
nature and the content of the
curriculum.”Whether reporters look at
public or private programs, she says,
“there is a story there, because every
preschool worth its salt has at least some
kind of checklist for children.”
Kagan is the Virginia and Leonard
Marx Professor of Early Childhood and
Family Policy at Teachers College,
Columbia University and a senior
research scientist at Yale University’s
Child Study Center.
Abby Thorman suggests that some
time around December, reporters should
look locally for the results of testing that
preschools do, mostly in October. She is
director of the Metropolitan Council on
Child Care for a coalition of local
governments in greater Kansas City.
“As someone who lives and breathes
and sleeps this stuff, I would say that
there’s a pretty interesting story in the
fact that in the ’80s, you had the Nation
at Risk study saying that one of three
kids is not ready for school. In the ’90s,
you had the National Education Goals
Panel saying one of three kids is not
ready for school. According to No Child
Left Behind, one in three kids isn’t
ready for school. Billions of dollars are
being invested in early childhood and
other programs, and if the numbers
aren’t shifting, there is something fundamentally flawed in how that money is
being spent.”
Budgets – and a preschool beat?
Anna Jo Haynes, executive director of
Mile High Montessori Early Learning
Centers for low-income children in
Denver, suggests reporters keep a sharp
eye open for what she predicts will be
cuts in preschool funding.“Even though
the economy may get turned around, at
the local and federal level funding these
programs is going to be very difficult,
and child care is not a mandated service
in any way. States can make choices
about whether they fund preschool. Even
though people pay on the private market
constantly, you have a whole segment of
the population where preschool is funded
What does a great preschool look
like?
B E A T
Steve Barnett suggests reporters could
get a fresh take on the question of
what a quality pre-K program looks
like by visiting publicly funded, special
education preschool programs that have
parents of children without disabilities
knocking on their doors. “A number of
communities have taken their special
ed preschools and opened them up to
mainstream kids. They tend to be of
really high quality, because we don’t
tolerate low quality when there’s the
threat of parents going to court,” says
Barnett, director of the National
C H I L D R E N ’ S
William T. Gormley Jr., co-director of
the Center for Research on Children in
the United States at Georgetown
University, is currently evaluating the
impact of Oklahoma’s universal prekindergarten.
“If I were a reporter looking at preK in my community, I would ask how
easy it is for a poor or a near-poor
person to get their child into a pre-K
program” or a preferred program, he
says. “Can you get your child into a preK program that fits your child’s
personality or emotional needs? I would
ask if there is a standard curriculum in
the community, or barring that, some
systematic effort to develop children’s
pre-reading and pre-math skills. … I
would also ask if there are collaborations
between pre-K and Head Start [a halfday program] or between pre-K and day
care. … The most meaningful program
for some children would be pre-K in
the morning, Head Start in the afternoon and then extended day care.
“Any good journalist also knows to
differentiate between legal requirements
and actual practices, especially in this era
of budget stringency. It’s clear that in a
number of jurisdictions, requirements
are not being met for child/staff ratios
in day care, and I know that’s also true
in preschools.”
Lillian G. Katz believes journalists
should invest the time to sit in preschool
classrooms and track what children actually do, minute to minute. “It would be
interesting if you went around town and
asked how much time children are
spending being passive,” says Katz,
director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on
Elementary and Early Childhood
Education. “We have data to show that
preschool children who are in a passive
program of formal instruction, who are
sitting a lot of the time, do pretty well in
the beginning on tests. But in the
follow-up, they do worse than kids who
have a much more active kind of preschool. … What I see a lot of is children
cutting out pictures and pasting, and that
is not intellectually engaging.
“The other thing I would look at if I
was a reporter, if I had the time, is what
is the content of interaction? There was
a big study done in Britain in the 1980s
showing that the majority of interactions
[in early education] are about the milk
money, or it’s time to clean up and put
things away.What we are now seeing in
neurological research is that sequences of
interactions are essential early in life to
develop connections between the midbrain and the pre-frontal cortex.What
recent neurological data show is that
young children need a lot of experience
in these sequential interactions. A lot of
them don’t get it, especially if they spend
a lot of their preschool time in large
group meetings.”
T H E
Amy Wilkins is executive director of
the nonprofit Trust for Early
Education, which promotes voluntary,
high-quality pre-kindergarten education for all 3- and 4-year-olds. “We’ve
Who gets access?
What do preschoolers do all day?
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How should parents choose a
preschool?
been doing a lot of focus groups with
parents, and while they want good
early childhood education for their
children, they don’t know what that is,”
she says. “The research tells us that
teacher education matters a lot, but
parents don’t get that they should be
asking [preschools] the question, ‘What
percentage of your teachers have bachelor’s degrees?’ Developing long-term
trusting relationships between children
and teachers is important, and parents
should be asking questions about
turnover on the staff.”
Williams says that unless parents begin
to request college-educated teachers who
are addressing kids’ cognitive, social and
developmental needs, then programs will
not feel pressured to raise their teacher
education requirements.
S U M M E R
by public sources, and that could crumble
or change significantly.”
Edward F. Zigler, the Yale
University professor of psychology who
is often referred to as the father of Head
Start, suggests reporters “follow the children” to flesh out the budget story. As
states squeeze their early childhood
spending,“What does it mean to a family
when a child goes from full-day to halfday kindergarten?” he asks.“How does
that family get by? That’s a very good
local story.”
Abby Thorman is concerned by
what she sees as a slowdown in private
funding for pre-K initiatives. “There was
a big explosion of work in the late 1990s
on this issue, and there is a pretty monumental shift in foundations who are
getting out of early childhood education,” or discontinuing research into the
thorniest issues, such as how to pay for
better quality preschools.Thorman
predicts that in the early education field,
“the speed at which change will take
place will decrease.”
More broadly, Haynes argues that
early childhood education should be part
of a beat, one that reporters follow as
closely as they do K-12 schooling “I
believe early childhood is the reform
issue in education, that it drives everything else. If kids learn to have good
vocabulary and good skills between birth
and age 5, then we will no longer have
to be concerned about whether they can
learn to read,” she says.
“I think the important thing for
reporters to do is to report all the time
on any segment of early childhood
education.The frequency of the
coverage, I believe, has a direct impact on
the quality of what we do. … If every
newspaper or magazine was checking in
to see how we’re doing, then foundations, people who give money,
policymakers would pay attention.”
17
Institute for Early Education Research
at Rutgers University. “You don’t have
to be an expert to see just how rich it
is. It’s the kinds of interactions kids
have with each other, it’s the activities
kids are doing.… I think it could be
kind of stunning to say, this is just how
good preschool can be when you have
a highly qualified teacher, strong supervision, good standards and it’s
adequately funded.”
The U.S. Census Bureau reports that in the year 2000, there were nearly 8
million 3- and 4-year-olds in America. The National Institute for Early
Education Research estimates that the cost to provide high-quality education to all children of that age – including facilities, administration and
support services – would be $68.6 billion a year. The cost for poor children
alone would be $11.6 billion.
Are preschools talking to public
schools?
S U M M E R
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T H E
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
18
Robert C. Pianta is a former special
education teacher and a clinical psychologist. As a professor in the Curry School
of Education at the University of
Virginia, Pianta studies children’s readiness for school. He suggests reporters
should ask whether local preschools and
public schools are communicating about
the skills young children need to start
school. “Has the public school described
an appropriate set of competencies for
kids before they enter school? Is the
curriculum in preschool at all coordinated with what’s going on in
kindergarten, and vice versa?”
In his research, he says, “We find
there is very little communication
between schools and feeder [preschools]
about what schools expect of kids. …
Schools might say something like, ‘A
child should be able to follow two or
three simple directions, or he should be
able to sit for 10 minutes and listen to a
story, and after hearing a story, he should
be able to re-tell it in his own words.’
Once kids enter a kindergarten classroom, that’s the stuff teachers value, and
it is not being communicated.”
Although 43 states have some type of public pre-K program, just 10 –
California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey,
New York, Ohio and Texas – account for two-thirds of all the money spent
on preschool, according to the Education Commission of the States.
During the 2000-2001 school year, the National Center for Education
Statistics reports, approximately 822,000 children (or less than one-tenth of
3- and 4-year-olds nationwide) were enrolled in public pre-K classes. In
2001, 56 percent of the nation’s 3- and 4-year-olds were enrolled in some
form of preschool.
According to statistics collected by Education Week in its 2002 “Quality
Counts” report, the average public school kindergarten teacher is paid
$36,770, compared to $19,610 for pre-K teachers in public and some
privately funded programs. Only 20 states and the District of Columbia
Former newspaper reporter
Susan Brenna is a regular contributor to The Children’s Beat.
susan@brennastone.com
require preschool teachers to be graduates of four-year colleges.
—Susan Brenna
Taking the Pulse of an Emerging Beat:
Children’s Health and the Environment
BY BOB WEINHOLD
By the time 8-year-old Josh Benally said his “bones hurt,” his parents had already spent months asking doctors why
their sport-loving son was losing his strength and appetite. Days later, a blood test confirmed that Josh had
lymphoblastic leukemia.
T
general, standards are based on limited studies of narrow populations, such as healthy adult males, and few address the full
range of body systems (neurological, immune, hormonal, reproductive, cardiovascular, etc.) that might be impacted, according
to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
Nor do standards address the effects of multiple contaminants;
in rare studies of how several chemicals interact, some have
found a significant increase in adverse health effects.
Evidence that pollutants are entering bloodstreams and not
just lingering in the environment was unveiled in January 2003
when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released
its Second National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental
Chemicals. The report documents the presence or absence of 116
natural and synthetic chemicals or their byproducts in a small
but representative group of people. Most of the findings include
data for children and confirm that children can be impacted
much differently than adults.The report – which offers data, but
no policy conclusions – should be updated biennially.
Children at risk
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T H E
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
Most experts agree that when it comes to environmental pollutants, children have unique vulnerabilities.They are lower to the
ground, where toxic substances tend to settle.Their activities –
crawling, playing or failing to wash their hands – may expose
them to dust and its attached contaminants, according to one of
the federal agencies taking more interest in children, the Agency
for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry of the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services. And, the agency
says, exposure effects could magnify as children’s bodies mature.
For their size, children also breathe more air, eat more food
and drink more water than adults, which is a concern if any of
those essential substances is contaminated with the more than
80,000 chemicals the EPA says are present in the environment.
Based on the most recent data available, the EPA estimates that
in 1996, every child lived in a county that exceeded the agency’s
benchmark for cancer risk from combined air pollutants, and 95
percent of children lived where at least one hazardous air pollutant posed non-cancerous health effects, such as neurological,
learning or reproductive problems, heart defects or breathing
impairments.That doesn’t mean a particular child will develop
S U M M E R
he most common of children’s cancers, leukemias
have risen sharply in the recent decades, up 40
percent from 1973 to 1995 and holding at about
2,200 new cases per year since, according to the American
Cancer Society.
As I reported while freelancing for the Durango (Colo.)
Herald, Josh may never know what caused his leukemia. But
among the many possible suspects behind the surge in children’s
cancers are environmental pollutants such as pesticides, benzene
and other organic solvents, says Philip Landrigan, chair of the
Department of Community and Preventive Medicine and
director of the Center for Children’s Health and the
Environment at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Leukemia is among many childhood illnesses that he and other
doctors, public health officials and activists suspect can be linked
to pollutants.
“It’s fair to say the evidence is becoming stronger,”
Landrigan says, noting that brain scans helped to finally prove
long-suspected damages caused by exposure to lead, mercury
and PCBs. Childhood asthmas are being linked to ozone and
airborne particulates, he adds. And scientists are exploring how
substances such as dioxins and pesticides can disrupt the
endocrine system, a critical player in reproduction and fetal
development.
Still, such links are hard to prove, mostly due to a lack of
data on children. Until the last decade, regulators looking at a
toxic substance would consult the exposure threshold for a 180pound man, for example, and calculate a proportional limit for
an 80-pound child. Now the Environmental Protection Agency
and other regulatory agencies are abandoning that reductionist
risk-setting, and acknowledging that children’s bodies are too
complex to be treated as a smaller version of an adult’s.
“We don’t know for sure, but we suspect there’s a pretty
good chance that children are more susceptible to pollution
than adults,” says Joanne Rodman, acting director of the EPA’s
Office of Children’s Health Protection, which was established in
1997. “Science takes a long time,” she cautions. “Things move at
a glacial pace.”
As a result, only a handful of potentially toxic substances,
such as lead, have health standards that apply to children. In
19
A P P H O T O / T H E F R E S N O B E E , T O M A S O VA L L E
Holding his 4-year-old son, Jemmy Bluestein listened to speakers discussing an air pollution cleanup plan for San Joaquin
Valley in Fresno, Calif., in June. The valley’s air is among the nation’s most polluted. Inhalers adorn the fence behind Bluestein.
S U M M E R
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20
any of these, but the risks are worse than what the agency
deems acceptable.
As data have become available, the government’s allowable
threshold for children’s and adults’ exposure to toxic substances
such as lead, arsenic and ozone has dropped substantially.While
the EPA waits for more science, it is using a combination of
techniques to reduce risk. “We’ve had good success at times
with voluntary industry approaches, but sometimes regulation is
necessary,” Rodman says. “Obviously there’s a tension there
[with industry].” Rodman’s office has put considerable focus on
pesticides, which she calls “a big issue for us.”
For its part, the pesticide industry says it follows government science, including the recent CDC report. “They do
inform our industry on better ways to do things,” says Angelina
Duggan, director of science policy for the lobbying group
Croplife America.
With big stakes for industries and government, limited data
and erupting controversies, children’s environmental health
issues can be woven into many beats: Health, science, environment, business, government and social issues. In this and the
next issue of The Children’s Beat, we cover several timely environmental health topics.
Local stories, local sources
It may be hard to find local experts on all sides of an environmental issue.You may want to start with state and local health
and environmental officials, but keep in mind that most doctors
and public health staff have had minimal training in environmental health topics.That will likely change in the next decade,
as these issues are integrated into medical school curricula.
It should be easier to find activist and industry perspectives,
but you may need to go national for the most informed source.
Those sources (see following pages) may be able to direct you
to an area expert you may not have been able to discover on
your own.
For more information on how other journalists are covering
these issues, check out the Web site of the Society of
Environmental Journalists (www.sej.org), where environmental
health stories show up almost daily. Nonmembers can search
most of the site, and members are often willing to share their
experiences in covering an issue.
While environmental health is a serious issue, stories investigating their possible effects don’t have to be depressing. Five
years after Josh Benally’s leukemia diagnosis, he still has to see
his doctor regularly for checkups, but his cancer is in remission,
he’s doing well in school, and he’s once again playing football in
the Colorado foothills.
Environmental Topics*
Allergies
The number of people with allergies to pollens, foods, drugs
and substances such as latex is growing rapidly. Allergies are the
sixth-leading cause of chronic disease, affecting 40 to 50 million
people, says the American Academy of Allergy Asthma and
Immunology.The government’s National Institute of Allergy
and Infectious Diseases finds that children may be more susceptible to hay fever than adults.
Among the suspected causes for the rise are increased indoor
air contaminants, accelerated pollen production with global
temperature increases, and antibacterial products that may
compromise children’s immunities.There are many methods for
coping with allergies, ranging from shots to avoiding exposures.
Story ideas: Are allergy treatments strapping family
budgets, even for those with insurance? Are family plans altered
*For live URL's on these topics, e-mail editor@casey.umd.edu.
because children can’t tolerate a destination? Do food allergies
make summer camp impossible? What are parents doing to
reduce their child’s exposure to home-based allergens? Can
low-income parents do the same?
Sources: American Academy of Allergy Asthma and
Immunology, John Gardner, press contact, 414-272-6071,
jgardner@aaaai.org, www.aaaai.org.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,
www.theallergyreport.org/reportindex.html
For daily forecasts of U.S. pollen counts, see
http://pollen.com.
Asthma
C H I L D R E N ’ S
Ground-level ozone is created when pollutants such as nitrogen
oxides and volatile organic compounds react in the presence of
heat and sunlight. Ozone levels increase in the summer and
pose a serious health threat.
The allowable federal standard has just been lowered, after
years of lawsuits. Children are particularly vulnerable to ozone,
especially when they play outdoors, and the American Lung
Association estimates that more than half of U.S. children live in
noncompliance areas.
Story ideas: What are ozone trends in your community?
Have children’s activities outside been restricted at times? If so,
have there been any impacts on family interactions, with kids
cooped up indoors? Are hospital ER visits straining alreadyoverloaded facilities?
Sources: For ozone basics, see www.epa.gov/air/
urbanair/6poll.html.
American Lung Association, Diane Maple, press contact;
202-785-3355, dmaple@lungusadc.org,
www.lungusa.org/air2001/reports02.html,
www.lungusa.org/air/children_factsheet99.html.
See also, www.epa.gov/air/oaqps/greenbk/oindex.html and
www.lungusa.org/press/envir/ozonestnd.html.
Archived regional patterns for ozone levels:
www.epa.gov/airnow.
Data by city and county: www.epa.gov/aqspubl1/
annual_summary.html.
Critics of the new ozone standard include the National
Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce (see p. 23).
T H E
B E A T
Awareness of health problems caused by beach pollution has
slowly been increasing. If a beach is polluted, exposure potential
can be high; the EPA estimates there are 910 million visits to
coastal areas each year.
Story ideas: Does your local beach have pollution data? If
not, why? Are there any trends in pollution or health consequences? Can public health officials identify pollution sources?
Sources: Data on contamination remains spotty, but two
starting points are the EPA’s BEACH Watch, John Millett, press
contact; 202-564-7842, millett.john@epa.gov,
www.epa.gov/waterscience/beaches; and the Natural Resources
Defense Council, Elliott Negin, press contact; 202-289-2405,
enegin@nrdc.org, www.nrdc.org/water/oceans/nttw.asp.
Ozone
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Beaches
Many families, as they head to their favorite fishing spots,
remain unaware of potential chemical and microbial contaminants in fish.These substances can pose serious short- and
long-term health problems. Monitoring for contamination
problems has increased, and state and federal agencies have
stepped up their public warnings about suspect areas and
specific contaminants such as mercury.
Story ideas: Have fish advisories been issued in your area?
Do people pay attention to them? What is being done to
reduce pollution at its source? For an example of how a journalist has covered this issue, see the dozens of stories written by
the Mobile (Ala.) Register’s Ben Raines, www.al.com/
specialreport/?mobileregister/mercuryinthewater.html.
Sources: Start at the EPA’s “Fish Advisories”Web site at
www.epa.gov/waterscience/fish/; Jeff Bigler is the press contact;
202-566-0389, bigler.jeff@epa.gov.
An environmental advocacy group, the Institute for
Agriculture and Trade Policy, has developed consumer information about fish, whether caught on vacation or bought in the
store.Their recommendations are targeted toward children and
women of childbearing age. Kathleen Schuler, press contact;
612-870-3468, kschuler@iatp.org, www.iatp.org/foodandhealth.
S U M M E R
Asthma is among the most well known environmental health
problems facing children, affecting about 5 million children
under 18, according to the CDC (the EPA estimates more than
6 million). For many, problems are worse in the warm weather.
The exact causes of the sometimes deadly breathing disorder
remain unclear, and there are no medical cures, just precautionary steps that children and parents can take.
Among the potential asthma culprits are certain chemicals,
tobacco smoke, mold, dust mites, cockroaches and furry pets.
Asthma is the third-leading cause of hospitalizations for children under 15, and costs children 14 million school days each
year. Problems are often perceived as worse in poor communities, but a study published in the June 2003 “Archives of
Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine” found little difference in
urban or rural settings.The authors also found that the number
of children who had asthma-like symptoms, but had not been
diagnosed, was about 50 percent higher than the number of
diagnosed cases.
Story ideas: Can parents afford the remedies prescribed by
their doctor? Can children change their behavior to reduce
their problems? Is the reduced exercise that can be triggered by
asthma contributing to the epidemic of children’s obesity?
Sources: CDC (box, p. 23) For asthma-related legislation in
your state, check with the National Conference of State
Legislatures, Gene Rose, press contact; 303-364-7700,
www.ncsl.org/programs/esnr/asthma.cfm.
The American Lung Association, Diane Maple, press contact;
202-785-3355, dmaple@lungusadc.org, www2.lungusa.org/
asthma.
Fish advisories
21
AP PHOTO / WEST COUNTY TIMES, MARK DUFRENE
In a 1998 photo, stacks from a Chevron refinery are shown beyond the playground at Peres Elementary School in
Richmond, Calif. Thousands of California school children still attend classes within a mile of industrial plants releasing tons
of toxic material into the air every year, environmentalist groups say.
West Nile virus
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C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
22
Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) such as West Nile virus,
Lyme disease and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)
continue to make headlines. More than 30 EIDs have
appeared, or reappeared, in the past three decades, says the
CDC (www.cdc.gov/globalidplan/index.htm).The diseeases
are often transmitted from wildlife to people, according
to the Consortium for Conservation Medicine
(www.conservationmedicine.org).
In addition to transmission via mosquitoes feeding on more
than 200 birds, mammals, and reptiles, in rare instances,West
Nile virus has been transmitted by a pregnant mother to her
developing child, and through breast feeding, blood transfusions
and organ donations, the CDC reports. Responses to EIDs,
such as spending less time outdoors, can influence the social
structure of a community.
With West Nile virus documented in almost every state, many
public health agencies are scrambling to deal with the issue.
Spraying programs to control mosquitoes often are one of the
first options considered. But some organizations contend that
spraying, especially if untargeted, poses more of a health threat
than the virus.They also are concerned that one of the recommended steps people can take – using repellents containing
DEET – can be harmful to some people, especially children.
Story ideas: What, if anything, are local officials doing
about local EIDs? If pesticide spraying is being considered for
West Nile, what are the community’s responses? Is there any
actual local threat or are perceptions based on national media
coverage?
Sources: Along with the CDC and the EPA, the U.S.
Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center is a good
starting point for information on many of these emerging
diseases. For West Nile virus, contact Paul Slota, 608-270-2420,
paul_slota@usgs.gov, www.nwhc.usgs.gov/research/west_nile/
west_nile.html.
For other information on pests, pesticides and less toxic pest
management techniques, see
www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol7no1/rose.htm and
www.epa.gov/pesticides/factsheets/skeeters.htm.
See also the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides,
www.pesticide.org/factsheets.html#alternatives. Contact
Caroline Cox, 541-344-5044, ext. 24; ccox@pesticide.org.
Wood preservatives
As families head to backyard decks, picnic tables or to public
playgrounds and campgrounds, they almost certainly will
encounter wood products treated with chromated copper arsenate (CCA, which looks greenish).
Based in part on investigative journalism by the St. Petersburg
Times’ Julie Hauserman (http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/sptimes,
search for “CCA” from March 2001 to the present), the EPA has
begun to phase out the product because of concerns about
arsenic, which can readily contaminate children and adults who
touch the wood or nearby soils. However, there are no requirements to remove existing wood; current inventories can be sold
and likely will last for many more months. Solutions such as
coating the wood with another substance have their own problems, such as short effective lifespans.Alternative products are
available, though it may be productive to investigate their makeup.
Story ideas: Is your local parks department doing anything
about CCA-treated wood in its facilities? Are buying patterns at
local building stores changing? Where can people send CCAtreated wood if they remove it?
Sources: EPA, David Deegan, press contact; 202-564-7839,
deegan.dave@epa.gov, www.epa.gov/pesticides/factsheets/
chemicals/1file.htm.
Environmental Working Group, Lauren Sucher, press contact;
202-939-9141, lauren@ewg.org, www.ewg.org/reports/
poisonedplaygrounds/ch5.html.
American Wood Preservers Institute, press contact;
703-204-0500, www.preservedwood.com.
Data on local pollution
• Air pollution data available at www.epa.gov/air/data
• Air pollution, toxic waste sites (including Superfund sites),
drinking water contamination, locations of local pollution
emitters and more is at www.epa.gov/enviro.
• Chemical information from ATSDR is at www.atsdr.cdc.gov/
toxfaq.html.
• National Air Toxics Assessment (developed by EPA; has
numerous limitations, but one of the few sources for actual
risk estimates): www.epa.gov/ttn/atw/nata.
• Scorecard (independent risk estimates, developed by the
activist group Environmental Defense; based on NATA as well
as other data sources), www.scorecard.org.
• Toxics Release Inventory (data collected by EPA):
www.epa.gov/tri or http://d1.rtknet.org/tri
Susan McClure, press officer; 770-488-4628, zur1@cdc.gov,
www.cdc.gov/nceh/kids/99kidsday/default.htm.
Children’s Environmental Health Network (Nonprofit
advocacy group) Offers a free e-mail service that can provide a
heads-up on breaking news and upcoming events. CEHN
released a lengthy report May 8, 2003, on the Bush administration’s successes and failures on children’s environmental health
issues.
Daniel Swartz, executive director; 202-543-4033, ext.16,
dswartz@cehn.org, www.cehn.org.
CropLife America (Trade association for pesticide industry)
Pat Getter, press officer; 703-329-8642,
pgetter@croplifeamerica.org, www.croplifeamerica.org.
National Association of Manufacturers (Trade association)
Jeffrey Marks, press officer; 202-637-3176, jmarks@nam.org,
www.nam.org.
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences,
Children’s Health
Gwen Collman, administrator; 919-541-4980,
collman@niehs.nih.gov, http://ehpnet1.niehs.nih.gov/children.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of
Children’s Health Protection
Joanne Rodman, acting director; 202-564-2708,
rodman.joanne@epa.gov, http://yosemite.epa.gov/ochp/
ochpweb.nsf/homepage.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Linda Rozett, press officer; 202-463-5682;
www.uschamber.com.
Center for Children’s Health and the Environment
(Nonprofit, source for medical experts)
Lauri Boni, administrator; 212-241-7840,
lauri.boni@mssm.edu, www.childenvironment.org.
B E A T
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National
Center for Environmental Health
Bob Weinhold is a freelance journalist
and author with a master’s degree in
journalism. He has written extensively
about environmental health issues
over the past decade, for outlets
ranging from local newspapers to
international peer-reviewed journals.
C H I L D R E N ’ S
American Chemistry Council (Industry association)
Chris VandenHeuvel, press officer; 703-741-5587,
chris_vandenheuvel@americanchemistry.com,
www.americanchemistry.com.
T H E
• America’s Children and the Environment: Measures of
Contaminants, Body Burdens, and Illnesses, U.S. EPA, February
2003, http://yosemite.epa.gov/ochp/ochpweb.nsf/content/
Publications.htm
• Second National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental
Chemicals, CDC, January 2003, www.cdc.gov/exposurereport
• “Child Health and the Environment,” Donald T.Wigle
Oxford University Press, 2003
• “Handbook of Pediatric Environmental Health,” American
Academy of Pediatrics, 1999
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Publications
Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry,
Office of Children’s Health
(Note: One of 13 North American Pediatric Environmental
Health Specialty Units may be in a city near you)
Elaine McEachern, press officer; 404-498-0070,
atsdric@cdc.gov, www.atsdr.cdc.gov/child/ochchildhlth.html.
S U M M E R
General resources
23
Chicago-area high school senior Mike Piazza and sophomore Luz Duarte shared their “coming out” experiences with
J E F F S C I O RT I N O, C H I C AG O T R I B U N E
reporter Nara Schoenberg and readers of the Chicago Tribune Magazine.
S U M M E R
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C H I L D R E N ’ S
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24
When They Want to Tell
The challenges of reporting on gay teenagers
BY CARA NISSMAN
When a jogger discovered 16-year-old Kyle Skyock
severely bruised and burned beside a Rifle, Colo., highway
two years ago, the public responded with a fury of insinuations and accusations about the cause of his injuries. But
Denver Post reporter Nancy Lofholm resisted immediately
writing about rumors that he was gay, in part because his
family begged her to keep the possibility secret.
“I went to meet the family in the hospital and they said they
had always thought he may be gay, but he never told them, and
they didn’t want everything in the paper,” Lofholm says.
The plea created a dilemma at the Post.
“It was very tough,” says Lofholm. “My editors and I were
thinking that it may have been like the Matthew Shepard case.”
(The 1998 bludgeoning death of a gay college freshman). “You
can’t ‘out’ somebody in the newspaper. So the fact that there
was a large piece of the story there and I had to ignore it until
it was confirmed was really hard.”
Lofholm also encountered conflicting reports about how
the slight youth sustained his injuries. Skyock’s family claimed
that he was assaulted. But a forensic pathologist who examined
him disagreed. Given the teen’s .230 blood alcohol level, the
B E A T
As gay issues make national headlines, many newsrooms are just
beginning to establish guidelines for coverage. Reporters at
some papers now have to consider whether identifying a
teenager’s sexual orientation might put them at risk for harassment or harm.
C H I L D R E N ’ S
Harrassment or harm?
T H E
Still, controversy over teen homosexuality is rife in most neighborhoods and communities, as well as within families.
Reporters must be especially enterprising about representing
the complexity of emotionally charged debates.
When the Sun-Sentinel’s Malernee went to cover a local antigay demonstration organized by an out-of-state church, she
could not help feeling she was just fueling the group’s agenda.
After letting the newspaper know of their plans, members of the
Topeka, Kan.-based Westboro Baptist Church marched in front
of a Florida high school to object to Broward County’s policy of
teaching tolerance toward homosexuals. Protesters waved signs
proclaiming “God Hates Fags” and “No Tears for Queers.”
“They knew how to get attention and play the system,”
Malernee says. “I went out there feeling bad about that.”
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Upholding objectivity
But she quickly found a few teenagers on their way to
school that morning – including a gay teen who had appeared
in a diversity training video for teachers – to react to the
protest, giving her story balance.
“It made the story more nuanced, rich and emotional,” she says.
Without access to the teenagers,“I would have had to call different
groups and the story would have been a little more stilted.”
Most anti-gay incidents are less sensational, say gay youths,
and that complicates a reporter’s job.When interviewing young
adults who claim to have suffered some form of injustice,
reporters must maintain the appropriate amount of skepticism
to discern the truth.
“I realized with a teenager making allegations [that it was
important] to make sure we had more than his word against the
entire school district,” says the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Davis
of the discrimination case he covered. “It helped his credibility
that his parents backed up everything he said.”
Yet even parents can bend the truth to bolster their child’s
dignity, as the Post’s Lofholm discovered, and challenge a
reporter’s impartiality.
“I think [Skyock’s] parents wanted to be part of a bigger
cause,” she says. “And if people knew he just got stinkin’ drunk
and stoned and fell down, they’d lose all the public’s support.
My personal opinion – not as a reporter – is that they wanted
to believe he was a victim.”
Other reporters wrestle with remaining dispassionate.
“It challenges your objectivity because you sort of want to
protect them,” says Nara Schoenberg, a Chicago Tribune features
writer who recently wrote a magazine piece about several teens
who came out in high school. “You want to be careful and
respectful of the kids. But you also have to keep in mind, ‘I’m a
reporter, not an advocate.’ It’s important to say this is happening
in society, to tell the truth about what’s going on. I think a lot
of what’s going on in high schools right now reflects the bigger
issues emerging in society.”
Or closer to home.The Sun-Sentinel’s Renaud, who is gay,
privately worried that if he highlighted drug abuse and prostitution among gay youths, he might paint the gay community in
a bad light.
“For people who don’t agree with that sexual orientation,
they might use that as a weapon,” says Renaud. He ultimately
went ahead with his story, eventually finding a gay teen who
was willing to talk openly about his life, including struggles
with discrimination and family rejection.
“It wouldn’t have been as powerful if I had just quoted a gay
activist,” Renaud says. “I wanted to find somebody who had
lived through the stereotypes of prostitution and doing drugs
and being homeless.”
S U M M E R
pathologist surmised that Skyock plummeted down a steep
embankment near the highway and was injured by jagged rocks.
Yet as word spread of the incident – and a recovering
Skyock announced to the media that he was gay – some press
and gay activist groups began speculating that the case was a
hate crime. Lofholm stayed her course, continuing to report on
other possible causes of Skyock’s injuries. Eventually, the district
attorney decided the incident was not a crime.
“I knew I had to keep an open mind for other information,”
Lofholm says. “I never felt pressure to change my stories at all,
but it was very tough to stick to that angle.”
Like Lofholm, other journalists have found that reporting on a
teen’s homosexuality, especially on a tight deadline, can be fraught
with risk.Young sources may not believe that stories can put
them in peril or reinforce negative stereotypes. Even if the story
illuminates injustices, a reporter may be left wondering if a teen is
sure enough of his sexual orientation to proclaim it in print.
Many newsrooms remain tentative about tackling the topic.
The lives of gay teens are underreported, says Jean-Paul
Renaud, a general assignment news reporter at the South Florida
Sun-Sentinel’s Miami bureau who recently wrote a story on
homeless gay youths. “A lot of activists are telling me that.”
Stories are more common in the education beat, says his
colleague, Jamie Malernee, who sees less shame and fear among
gay students than in the past. “We have had a lot of stories
about gay issues in the past few years,” she says. “The fact that
there are more gay-straight alliances at schools that didn’t exist
15 years ago shows you something.”
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette police reporter Andy Davis
recently covered a homosexual 14-year-old boy’s plan to sue his
school district over discrimination.The boy, who claimed a
teacher preached Bible scriptures to him upon learning that the
teen was gay, wanted to make his story public. Davis expected
the article to generate a lot of flak.
“Obviously the South is known for being pretty socially
conservative,” says Davis. “That’s part of what makes it a good
story, you know, because it’s a topic that’s going to be pretty
controversial.”
That may have been so around the water coolers, but the
paper received scant response from angry readers.
25
“We haven’t sat down and had a discussion about naming
people,” says Jamie Malernee. “But if they don’t mind giving
their full names, I don’t think they’re literally in danger of their
lives.”
Teens might be at risk in other areas. Indeed, 83 percent of
904 homosexual students surveyed nationwide in 2001 by the
Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network reported being
verbally harassed in the past year because of their sexual
orientation.
Malernee says she once elected not to push a bisexual teen
for her last name, recognizing that the student’s opinions mainly
provided background for her story.
“If she had said something controversial that needed to be
backed up with proof, I would have needed her name,” she says.
“But I was just quoting her feelings, adding a personal voice to
the story. She wasn’t accusing somebody of something.”
Malernee says reporters should not feel compelled to treat
these stories as they would rape stories, in which the media
traditionally omit victims’ names. But when a story’s subject is
sensitive, she decides on a case-by-case basis, then has a discussion with her editor.
“Sometimes people make the argument that if you don’t use
their names, that’s saying they’re ashamed,” she says.
The Tribune’s Schoenberg, who sought parental permission
before interviewing and publishing the names of teens younger
than 18, found that persistence and patience reaped results
when it came to gleaning names.
They’re out there
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B E A T
26
• Six out of 10 high school seniors
surveyed nationwide by Hamilton
College and Zogby International in
2001 said they had openly gay classmates.
• More than 1,600 gay-straight alliances
(high school clubs that champion
tolerance) are active nationwide,
according to the Gay, Lesbian and
Straight Education Network. Fewer
than six were active in 1990.
• A 2001 University of North Carolina
study estimated that 5 to 6 percent of
students ages 17 and younger in the
United States identify themselves as
gay, lesbian or bisexual.
“Parents are protective and have concerns about their children’s safety,” she says. “I did run into one case where the
parents said, ‘No how, no way.’ ”
Even when reporters take care not to take advantage of a
gay teenager’s vulnerability, there is no guarantee of safety.
As the teen reporter at the Boston Herald, I recently wrote
about the progress of gay-straight alliances in Massachusetts
(where the nation’s first group was founded in 1989). Most
students worried not about publishing their names, but about
sharing their sexual orientations. I decided that discussing the
activities they had organized and changes they had inspired in
their schools proved more relevant than whom they wanted to
date, and left out their orientations.
But, despite my efforts to shield her identity, a student told
me that she had received a hurtful letter at school that said
homosexuality “causes earthquakes and heartbreaks.” Although
the letter, which she believes was penned by an elderly person
in her community, did not contain any threats, it rattled her.
Nonetheless, the teen was proud that her views had been heard.
Cara Nissman is the teen reporter at
the Boston Herald and a recipient of a
2003 Journalism Fellowship in Child
and Family Policy through the
University of Maryland.
cnissman@bostonherald.com
Sources include:
• Caitlin Ryan, director of policy studies
at the San Francisco State University
Institute on Sexuality, Inequality and
Health, and Rafael Díaz, SFSU
professor of human sexuality studies
and ethnic studies, are conducting the
first-ever study of affects on homosexual youths of coming out to family
members during adolescence. Contact
Matt Itelson, 415-338-1743, 415- 3381665; matti@sfsu.edu
• Stephen Russell, professor specializing
in adolescent development and sexuality at the University of California at
Davis, who has published several statistical studies of gay youths:
530-752-7069, strussell@ucdavis.edu.
Investigating youth homosexuality
Seek the help of experts if you’re not
certain how to approach a story
regarding gay youths, says Nara
Schoenberg of the Chicago Tribune.
“It’s hard to call someone up when
you’re still kind of stupid on the issue,”
she says. “But it saves a lot of time.”
Informational Web sites:
Pro-homosexuality
• The Gay Lesbian and Straight
Education Network, 212-727-0135 or
www.glsen.org.
• The Lambda Legal Defense and
Education Fund, 212-809-8585 or
www.lambdalegal.org.
Anti-homosexuality
• Family Research Council,
202-393-2100 or
www.frc.org/homosexuality.cfm
• Focus on the Family, 800-232-6459 or
www.family.org.
Ease into an interview
Jean-Paul Renaud of the Sun-Sentinel
says reporters should keep in mind the
following tips when interviewing youths:
• Take the time to listen to their stories
and their concerns, even if they
meander.
• Show patience and respect.
• Maintain your role as reporter, not
moral judge.
• Seek out stories that will examine, not
strengthen, stereotypes.
• Gauge the potential consequences
of your story as well as its probable
benefits.
High School in the Hangar
Fighting a dated image, tech schools train teens
for fast-growing jobs
B Y M E L A N I E D. G . K A P L A N
A V I AT I O N H I G H
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
MARCIN GODLEWSKI
here was little doubt that Denny Reyes would be the valedictorian of his
T
class at Aviation High School in Queens. The son of an immigrant cashier
and an unemployed elevator operator, Reyes was book-smart; he never evenworked with his hands as a kid. Most of his classmates were different. Less
the New York City public school where teenagers learned to make airplanes fly.
Finding their passion
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
Over the next 10 years, 18 of the 20
fastest-growing jobs will require technical education, whether in food
preparation or computer engineering,
according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics. After experiencing a drop in
the 1980s, enrollment in career and
technical education programs remained
constant in the last decade, educators say,
though national figures are hard to come
T H E
boroughs of the city, as much as two
hours each way on buses and trains, to
the only school of its kind in the country.
Some days, school lasted from 7:15 to
3:45, like a regular job. And each student
studied a phone book-sized Federal
Aviation Administration (FAA) guide of
1,100 questions for the aircraft maintenance technician’s certification exam.
“Technical education” conjures up
images of dead-end, blue-collar jobs, but
Reyes knew different. On graduation
day, June 25, 2001, he walked to the
podium at the back of the hangar, and
looked out at the Cessna 411, the Army
2 0 0 3
Yet Reyes shared their dream: a career
in aviation. On the way there, the teens
walked down hallways to the highpitched buzzing of air drills and the
clanking of metal, and sat in classrooms
with yellowing posters of airplanes and
old, retired engines. Clad in coveralls,
every student made model airplanes,
complete with lights and a motor, and
they learned how to detect hairline
cracks in aircraft parts.
They studied welding and sheet metal,
learning how to apply math and science
to propeller blade angles and electrical
systems. Students commuted from all
S U M M E R
studious, they had been building, fixing, tinkering for years. They were naturals for
MASH helicopter and the TA4
Skyhawk, the one donated by the
Marines to honor a 1977 graduate who
died in the Gulf War.
Notes in hand, Reyes spoke about
overcoming adversity and how those
from the poorest neighborhoods could
still pursue a college education. It wasn’t
just talk. Reyes had earned a full scholarship to M.I.T.
In the audience was classmate Jamal
Straker, who grew up with his mother in
the rough Brooklyn neighborhoods of
East New York and Bedford-Stuyvesant,
and whose father, a subway driver, told
him he’d never graduate from high
school. Instead Straker, whose friends
called him “Piggy” because of his pearshaped body, surprised everyone by
falling in love with learning. Once an
indifferent student, he poured over FAA
regulations that govern everything from
pre-flight checklists to fuel and cargo. Just
like on the street, all the rules were laid
plain; you would be OK if you knew
them cold.“I’ve found the best way not
to get in trouble is to know what the law
is,” he said.“So learning the FAA rules
was fun for me.”
Aviation doesn’t have as many
academic success stories or send as many
students to college as a top public school
like Brooklyn Tech, but it regularly graduates students like Straker, who never
knew they loved to learn, and Reyes, a
quiet boy who could have been lost in a
big-school crowd.Two months before
graduation, Reyes had been inducted as
a future aviation leader into the
Laureates Hall of Fame in Washington,
D.C. Accompanied by his father and
Aviation’s principal, he had given a oneminute speech, during which his cheeks
turned the color of cranberries.
27
S U M M E R
2 0 0 3
T H E
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
28
by. Some 11,000 U.S. high schools offer
limited technical courses; there are also
several hundred career and technical
high schools (such as Aviation) and 1,400
public vo-tech centers, usually serving
students from several area schools.
The biggest challenges facing career
and technical education today are limited
funding and a dated image of vocational
school as a place for kids who couldn’t
make it elsewhere, where boys are sent
to become greasy mechanics, and girls to
become gum-smacking beauticians.
“We’re working hard to fight that
stigma,” says Dianne Mondry, who
teaches at Community High School, a
small career and technical school in
Grand Forks, N.D.“I won’t use the word
‘vocational’ because it means students
who don’t have good skills.To the
contrary, our students need good skills or
they won’t be successful in automotive,
computer, medical, any of these professions.” Students learn in different ways,
Mondry says, and for some, applying their
skills in the workplace is more effective
than traditional coursework.
One of the new selling points of
these programs is that their academic
rigor is improving, as national and state
standards become more rigid.Technical
schools that used to prepare students for
work immediately following high school
may now offer complete academic
curricula, while vo-tech centers rely on
students’ home schools for academic
classes. Students pursue a range of goals;
some want careers where they work
with their hands, some have their minds
set on college and even graduate school,
and still others are focused on getting a
job so they can pay for post-secondary
education and perhaps support their
families. Most Aviation graduates – the
majority of whom come from immigrant families or are first-generation
Americans – continue their schooling,
often working as aircraft maintenance
technicians or elsewhere in the field to
put themselves through college.
“We give students an opportunity in
the program to find their passion,” says
Linda Smith, a teacher at Northeast
Technology Center in Pryor, Okla.
“Once they learn that, there’s no stopping them.” Northeast, an area school
that accepts high school juniors and
seniors for programs ranging from auto
collision repair to diesel mechanics,
works closely with local businesses. Part
of Smith’s job, as a teacher of marketing,
business management and entrepreneurship, is to understand the needs of local
employers.When one of her students was
interested in hospitality, Smith spent a
month of her summer vacation interning
in a local hotel so she could train the
student for a hotel management job.
Smith wants her students to experience
problem-solving and decision-making in
the work world – skills that are given less
emphasis in most academic programs.
Reyes, who just finished his freshman
year at M.I.T. (after spending an optional
fifth year at Aviation to receive additional
technical training and another FAA certification), says he arrived at college steps
ahead of his peers because of his technical skills. At Aviation, everyone spends
their final year in the hangar, where the
planes are older than the students and
have been taken apart and rebuilt countless times. Like future doctors studying a
cadaver, Aviation students look to the
innards of these planes to understand
flight.They walk around under the
hangar’s fluorescent lights, armed with
tools and manuals, fixing landing gears,
placing rivets, applying touch-up paint or
checking hydraulic systems.When the
hangar doors are rolled open, students
pull a few of the aircraft outside to what
looks more like a prison yard than a high
school playground.There, they check the
aircraft systems and attempt to start the
engines, as the smell of aviation fuel wafts
into the upstairs classroom windows.
“At Aviation, we worked in teams on
a project, to troubleshoot systems and
whatnot,” says Reyes, who is majoring in
aeronautical and astronautical engineering. “In engineering, when you
design something on a team, you need
to have people skills.”
Now that he’s taken a year of rigorous
classes, he says Aviation could do more to
prepare students academically by pushing
critical thinking skills. Still, he adjusted
quickly to the college workload and
academic standards; he built new study
habits and ended the second semester
with A’s and B’s. He lived in the Spanish
House on campus, where he learned to
cook meals for his housemates, experimenting with enchiladas, pot roast and
orange chicken. He talks to his parents
and sister often but doesn’t go into much
detail about his classes or the seven or
eight hours of homework every night.
Reyes says he is the only student he
knows on campus who went to a technical school, and he usually surprises his
peers when he tells them he’s worked on
rebuilding airplanes.
“A professor told me that the kids [at
M.I.T.] know the mathematics,” he says,
“but when it comes to actually
designing something they’re inexperienced, and someone who has the
experience working with their hands is
very valuable.”
Job skills plus
pharmacy job) and where he felt
accepted.
Even Straker’s teachers were surprised
when he scored 1080 on his SAT, in the
top 12th percentile for black students
who took the test in 2001. He applied to
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
in Daytona Beach, Fla., because his best
friend did; both were accepted and
recently finished their first year.
Before Straker left for college, he
talked about the suburban mansion he
would have one day, with its pool in the
shape of a dollar sign and a lion cub for
a pet. “I don’t think I’ll ever be happy
until I’m making six figures,” he said one
afternoon. Already, he knew he was
different from the boys in his old neighborhood.When he went back to
Brooklyn in his V-neck sweaters and
khaki pants, he stuck out. He would say,
“I’m a product of the ‘hood without any
of the ‘hood left in me.”
And Reyes, once shy and withdrawn,
has become more social in the hours
between studying at college. He not only
has learned to cook and ski with friends
at school, but he’s learned more about
himself and his priorities. And if he was
once uncertain where a school with
landing gears hanging from the ceilings
would lead him, Reyes is now confident
about his career path. “Aviation taught
me that aeronautical engineering
combined planes and space and engineering,” he says. “Everything that as a
child I thought was cool.”
High-paying occupations
requiring education and training
below the bachelor’s level
• air traffic controller
• elevator installers and
repairers
• dental hygienists
• electrical powerline installers
• registered nurses
• aircraft mechanics
• computer support specialists
• electrical and electronic technicians
• operating engineers
• postal workers
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
Association for Career and Technical Education www.acteonline.org
Automotive Youth Educational Systems www.ayes.org
Federal Aviation Administration www2.faa.gov/education/resource.htm#atc2
North American Technician Excellence Inc. www.natex.org
National Assessment of Vocational Education www.ed.gov/offices/OUS/PES/NAVE
National Automotive Technicians Education Foundation www.natef.org
National Dissemination Center for Career and Technical Education www.nccte.com
T H E
Sources for reporting on technical education
2 0 0 3
Melanie D.G. Kaplan is a freelance
writer based in Washington, D.C.
MelanieDGKaplan@aol.com
S U M M E R
The fundamental skills taught at career
and technical schools are a transferable
asset, say educators. Rick Lester, manager
of technician development programs for
Toyota Motor Sales USA, in Torrance,
Calif., says high-school level programs
also make students aware of career opportunities that they may not otherwise
consider.Toyota works with 125 high
schools nationwide, usually connecting
the school with a local dealership, which
may hire students or offer internships.“I
can speak from personal experience,” says
Lester.“I went into a vocational program
after high school, and a lot of the skills I
was taught on diagnosing a problem I
apply every day in business. And I haven’t
touched a car in 15 years. It’s about
breaking a problem down and determining how each of the components are
affected by other components in order to
resolve the issue.”
At Aviation, students also learn good
habits, such as punctuality and dependability.To graduate, students must
complete 1,900 hours of training in 44
areas of instruction. More than six
absences per year means summer school.
When students are late to class or sloppy
with their work, teachers remind them
that tardiness in this industry might
mean delaying a plane of 300 passengers
and that one mistake – even if the
consequences aren’t tragic – can cost a
mechanic his job and reputation.
Internships and mentorships often
jump-start a student’s enthusiasm for
school. At Aviation, Straker held an
internship at the FAA’s legal department,
where he helped attorneys with paperwork for smoke-detector-tampering
cases. During school, his career plans
shifted from being a cop, then a pilot,
and by senior year, an air traffic
controller. But he was intrigued by the
office environment at the FAA, where
he wore clothes bought on sale at
Structure and Banana Republic (with
money he earned at his $6.40-an-hour
29
This Just In
Updates From CJC
Fellows and Friends
Tracey Reeves (1999 national conference) has been promoted from general
assignment reporter for The Washington
Post to assignment editor in charge of
the paper’s Anne Arundel (Md.) bureau
in Annapolis. Previously, Reeves worked
the child and family issues beat as a
national staff reporter for KnightRidder’s Washington bureau. In her new
position, she’ll supervise five reporters
and expects to edit a good number of
child/family stories. Reeves’ eventful
summer included an August move to a
new home and a double birthday: her
twins turned 7 in June.
S P R I N G
2 0 0 3
T H E
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
30
From her health and behavior beat in
the LIFE section at USA TODAY,
Marilyn Elias (2000 national conference) notes that the war in Iraq “sent an
unprecedented number of U.S. moms
into harm’s way”; she explored that
phenomenon in a cover story on
whether the military deployment,
wartime capture and/or death of a
mother affects children differently than
the war involvement of a father (see
www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/20
03-04-07-military-moms_x.htm). On a
lighter note: For Father’s Day, Elias wrote
a piece playing off the independent
movie Blue Car, which she says
poignantly explores “the special relationship of fathers and daughters.” Her
coverage incorporated new research that
suggests fathers can play a unique role in
girls’ lives (www.usatoday.com/news/
health/2003-06-10-daughters-anddads_x.htm).
After nearly four years at the San Antonio
Express-News, Elaine Aradillas (2000
national conference) is leaving to pursue
a master’s degree in journalism at
Columbia University. She’ll focus on
magazine writing and coverage of diversity and minority affairs. “Some of my
ideas may fail,” she writes, “but at least
I’ll have the time to experiment without
the daily pressure of a deadline.”
Los Angeles Times senior
photo editor Gail
Fisher and Washington
Post reporter Sewell
Chan are among eight
recipients of the
Rosalynn Carter
Fisher
Fellowships for Mental
Health Journalism.
Fellows receive $10,000
to study a mental health issue for a year.
Chan will examine the District of
Columbia’s efforts to strengthen a
community-based system of care for
children with mental illness. Fisher, who
wrote for the Winter 2002 issue of “The
Children’s Beat,” will produce a documentary, using video and still cameras, of
a family’s efforts to care for a loved one
with mental illness.
After two years, Melanie Plenda (2001
Los Angeles conference) left the crime
beat at the Juneau Empire in June. Her
new job: a one-year position as a child
protective services outreach advocate at a
battered woman’s shelter. “I haven’t given
up on crime reporting, in fact it is what
I want to make my life’s work,” she
writes. “I believe this job is giving me a
first-hand look at and knowledge of a
system that is notoriously closed to the
public.… Doing this can only make me
a better, kinder and more accurate
reporter.”
Konat are the doting parents of a
Guatemalan-born daughter, 4-year-old
Julia. Savitch’s other projects have
included the Nick’s widely hailed
coverage of 9/11 and its aftermath, as
well as pieces about shoplifting, the
Columbine shootings and race relations.
Rachel Jones (1995 national conference), who reports on child health and
development issues for NPR, spent two
weeks in June in Accra, Ghana, where
she led an HIV/AIDS journalism workshop for 30 young reporters.The U.S.
State Department invited Jones; the
seminar was co-sponsored by the
embassy in Accra and the Africa Institute
for Journalism and Communications.
“Many of the journalists in Ghana
have little formal training [and] the
concept of ‘free media’ is relatively new,”
writes Jones. Reporters needed “very
basic information about the language of
HIV/AIDS, interviewing and reporting
skills,” and the like. “It was a wonderful
learning experience for them and me.”
Jones (right) with a Ghanian journalist
Though Lori Savitch
(1994 national conference) produces
freelance television
programming for a
variety of outlets, some
of her favorite projects
Savitch and
have been for “Nick
News,” the news broad- Julia
cast for children on
cable TV’s Nickelodeon.
Her latest Nick project, which aired July
13, is the half-hour special “My Family is
Different – I’m Adopted.” Hosted by
veteran broadcaster Linda Ellerbee, the
special reflected children’s views of
adoption and included those of grown
adoptees, such as singer Faith Hill.
Savitch brought personal insights to the
topic: She and her husband Gregory
While a CJC fellow, David Zucchino
(1994 national conference) was a Pulitzer
Prize-winning Philadelphia Inquirer
reporter writing about youth crime. He
joined the Los Angeles Times in summer
2001 and still covers some Philadelphia
crime stories, including a May 30 slaying
he says “shocked even this tough, gritty
town”: Four teens allegedly plotted to
lure a 16-year-old friend to a secluded
spot, then beat him to death.
Zucchino’s done his share of globetrotting too. In early July, preparing for
his second coverage tour of the Iraq war
and aftermath, he sent us this recap:
“[During the war] I was indeed an
embed. Got dumped in a canal, lost all
my gear, but did get to ride into
CJC Datebook
Baghdad on the armored column that
took the city…. Spent the end of 2001
covering al Qaeda on the mean streets of
Paris.Then spent most of 2002 making
four trips to Afghanistan.Then Iraq this
winter and spring, back for more.”When
he’s not on the road, Zucchino works
from home outside of Philadelphia.
Recent Fellows
Congratulations to the fellows chosen
for our June regional conference, “Youth
Crime in Context,” held in Denver.
Jan Katz Ackerman,
The Hays (Kan.) Daily News
Charlie Brennan,
Rocky Mountain News, Denver
Paula Clawson,
The Livingston (Mont.) Enterprise
John Foster,
Rio Grande SUN, Espanola, N.M.
Geoff Grammer,
The Santa Fe New Mexican
The Los Angeles Times’ David
Zucchino, left, and photographer Rick
Loomis at Saddam Hussein’s “Hands
of Victory” monument; entrance to
the military parade ground near the
Presidential Palace, Baghdad.
RICK LOOMIS, LOS ANGELES TIMES
Sarah Langbein, Fort Collins Coloradoan
Lisa Martinez,
Greeley (Colo.) Daily Tribune
Peggy Mears, Brainchild Productions,
Inc., Irvine, Calif.
Carole Nez, freelance,
Albuquerque, N.M.
Oct. 22, 2003 – Seminar for
Southern Newspaper Publishers
Association, (SNPA) members,
Raleigh N.C.
Dec. 2-4, 2003 – Seminar for
SNPA members, Richmond,Va.
Jan. 20, 2004 – Application deadline for CJC national conference,
“Condition Critical: Covering
Children’s Health”
March 1, 2004 – Entry deadline
for Casey Medals for Meritorious
Journalism
March 14-18, 2004 – “Condition
Critical: Covering Children’s
Health,” College Park, Md.
Curt Nickisch, KCSD-FM Public
Radio, Sioux Falls, S.D.
Bill O’Connell, The Seguin (Texas)
Gazette-Enterprise
Peggy O’Hare, Houston Chronicle
Julio Ochoa,
Greeley (Colo.) Daily Tribune
Domingo Ramirez Jr.,
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Christine Reid, Daily Camera,
Boulder, Colo.
2 0 0 3
Juliette Rule, Wyoming Tribune-Eagle,
Cheyenne
Subscribe to
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CJC’s quarterly magazine is free, but
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In the body of the message, simply
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B E A T
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National Public Radio
Keep us posted on your stories, beat
and job changes and other developments in your life. Send clips and
news to:
C H I L D R E N ’ S
Julie Scelfo, Newsweek
Share Your News!
T H E
Lisa Sandberg,
San Antonio Express-News
Senta Scarborough,
The Arizona Republic
S P R I N G
Martha Shirk (2001 Los Angeles
conference fellow and speaker, 1995
national conference speaker, 1994
national conference fellow) took a break
from book projects to spend a week this
summer coaching journalists abroad. In
early July Shirk traveled to Montenegro
– formerly southern Yugoslavia – on a
teaching mission sponsored by the U.S.
State Department’s Office of
International Programs (successor to the
U.S. Information Agency).The mission is
meant to foster press freedoms in countries long denied them. In the capital
city of Podgorica, Shirk talked to the
journalists about covering child and
family issues; her husband William Woo,
a Stanford University journalism
professor, spoke on journalistic ethics.
Next, Shirk resumed work on two
books set for summer 2004 publication
by Westview Press. She’s updating
“Kitchen Table Entrepreneurs,” which
tells how 11 low-income women moved
their families out of poverty by starting
their own businesses. And “On Their
Own,” will “describe the challenges that
young people face after aging out of
foster care.”
John Ingold, The Denver Post
Oct. 3-4, 2003 – Regional
conference, “Youth Crime in
Context,” in conjunction with
Northwestern University’s
Medill School of Journalism,
Evanston, Ill.
31
“A Family, In Brief” – Zacchary Taylor, 11, stands outside his home.
4321 Hartwick Rd., Suite 320
College Park, MD 20740
© R É G I N A M O N F O RT