Electric Fishwrap has moved

I’ve been trying to make time to tell the unusual and interesting stories on the education beat. Between the meeting coverage, Monday packages and budgets, budgets, budgets, it’s often hard to find that time.

In late January, a photographer at work told me about an unusual basketball game. It was just a normally scheduled game, but the stands were packed, everyone was dressed in school colors and the atmosphere was electric.

Turns out it was a rivalry game, but not just any rivalry game. Anacortes High School had asked Burlington-Edison High School if they would be their rival. The story is here, but the short version is Anacortes has lost students over the years and their previous rivalries have disappeared as Anacortes has moved down a league or two. School administrators and students wanted to ramp up school spirit.

I decided right then and there that I had to write a story about it.

A secret: I am a huge sucker for school spirit. This may brand me as a dork or a nerd, but I always dressed up as whatever spirit day it was when I went to high school. Wear green and gold day? Check. Injury day? Leg braces, an arm sling and crutches. By the time senior year rolled around, I was voted as “most spirited girl” in the senior superlatives. This was a huge surprise to me because I thought I wasn’t that popular.

So in short, the nerd in me was intrigued. I thought it was cute that another school would ask another to be its rival.

Reporting the story was a challenge because the game had already happened. Not only that, when the photographer worked the game, they were shooting a basketball game, not the fans. It took me a couple of weeks to get all of the reporting done. I had to find snippets of time between my other assignments to fit it into my schedule.

In the few days before it ran, I kept poking and prodding the story: twisting a sentence here, changing a phrase there, double and triple checking my spelling. I actually woke up in a panic the night before it ran because I was afraid that something was wrong.

I was really happy with the finished story. Turns out a lot of the staff had read it before it went in the paper and they started sharing stories of their high school days (who knew we had three former cheerleaders in our newsroom?). One person even said they wished they could have gone to the game after reading the story.

This post is the first in a monthly series, Story of the Month.

Again I’ll post the top three fun stories of 2008. I wrote a post about this last year. The goal is not to write about the best stories I wrote, but the stories where I had the most fun reporting them.

3. Trent Henderson follows in his father’s footsteps

At the time when this story was written, the Mitchell Report was in the forefront of many players’ minds. Talking with a baseball scout and the players about steroids gave this story extra context. I am also grateful that my editors gave me time to work with the sports department to write this story. I’ve always enjoyed writing sports stories, and this was one of two I wrote in 2008.

2. A standard for failure

One of the most challenging tasks for reporters is making sure government speak is translated so an average reader can understand. I am not sure how often I succeed, but I think I did with this story. Every year in August, the results for the Washington Assessment for Student Learning are released to the public. And every year, reporters struggle with how to present that information to their readership. The data is complicated and it’s difficult to sum up that amount of information into an easy-to-digest format.

I had thought about how to do this for weeks, when I had an idea. Long story short, there are about three dozen categories schools must pass in No Child Left Behind. If the school fails one, the entire school fails. So I measured how many categories each school had passed as a percentage of the total they measured against (because not all schools use each category). The result is a tidy bar graph for each 10th-grade class in the county. A reader can quickly glance at the graphs and compare other districts’ 10th graders. They can also see that every district has lost ground because the standards have risen.

The story also gave school officials a chance to vent about the system. This was my first year reporting on the WASL results. Next year I’ll definitely reach out to more parent groups and students to gauge their thoughts.

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I don’t think I’m a great judge of my own writing. Any writer can appreciate this I am sure. You’re trying your best, you spend lots of time on a story and then you have someone else read it and they find things wrong with it.

So this isn’t a top 3 best stories of the year. It’s the top 3 stories where I had the most fun reporting them. I’ll provide links to the stories so you can read them if you like.

3. B-E students see Chehalis devastation firsthand

To anyone who knows me, this is a no-brainer. I love writing about the weather. I really like getting out of the office and I love creating audio companion pieces. See my previous post for more commentary.

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