| No Images? Click here   Writing for HuffPost Highline, Kathryn Joyce delved deep into a fight that’s ripping apart Parkland, Florida. This one has nothing to do with gun control. It’s about school discipline and whether or not a diversion program pioneered there contributed to the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Joyce, a reporter with Type Investigations, interviewed grieving teachers and parents, an embattled school superintendent, and a conservative researcher who came to play a crucial role in the struggle.How did this particular story land on your radar?I became interested in the debates around school discipline before the Parkland shooting. I was initially planning on covering the subject by looking at a different school district, St. Paul, where local reforms had become very controversial in the mid-2010s. But as I started talking to people there, the same sorts of questions began to emerge around the tragedy in Parkland. And because the loss there was so profound, and the stakes were so high, the fight about discipline reform in Broward County seemed to become much more vitriolic.What was the hardest part about reporting this story? Because emotions were still so raw, did you approach it differently?I think there were a number of hard things about reporting this piece. The pain and trauma in Parkland seemed present everywhere, even many months after the shooting. Family members of MSD victims who I spoke to had turned their grief into action in a really wide range of ways, with different people working on different issue areas, from gun control to school hardening to mental health to, in some cases, the school discipline debate. Their personal stories were heart wrenching and very important, even as I was there to report on something related but different. It was also challenging to report on a story involving complex policy issues and contested data points, where both sides accused the other of manipulating information in order to advance an agenda. We tried our best to ground those competing claims in reporting and the research that's been done on this issue.Have you talked to some of your sources since the piece came out? What's the reaction been like in general?I've heard from some people so far. Unsurprisingly, it seems like people who have had strong opinions on either side of this issue continue to have them, and that's reflected in how they've read the piece. Beyond that, it's been interesting to hear from both readers who'd known nothing about this fight before and those who had watched it unfold themselves.Do you think diversion programs like Broward County's PROMISE will survive?In Broward, it seems like there's still a lot of public support for PROMISE at some of the recent school board community meetings. The majority of the school board seems committed to its continuing as well. At the same time, district officials told me, even some who support the program strongly have suggested that it be rebranded under a new name, since the attacks over the past year have really stigmatized the program. It also seems that when people actually visit the program, they come away with a much different understanding than what they'd read or heard about from critics.On the other hand, just last week, North Carolina's state Senate voted to repeal local discipline reform policies, not because any school districts had asked for it, but because "some people" concerned about lenient school discipline had.Love, |
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