Call for proposals: education in a pandemic
Grants are available for solutions-focused reporting on how schools are adapting and changing
Across the United States, in massive urban districts and one-room rural school houses, educators, parents, and students are figuring out how to teach, learn, and cope in the new reality of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Classrooms have been rearranged — desks six feet apart, colored dots on the floor. Curriculum has been redesigned to accommodate in-person instruction, virtual instruction, and both at once. Breaks have been lengthened and staggered to reduce hallway congestion. Teachers have become adjunct janitors, cleaning and disinfecting between classes.
Reopening schools has been a massive, complex, often very expensive endeavor. In the early days, that effort to balance public health with educational mandates has gone well in some places, poorly in others, with mixed results in most.
But the pandemic also has exposed structural inequities that existed before the crisis and will persist after. Educators and policy makers have been confronted with questions around access to technology; the limitations of a traditional physical school and an 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. school day; and the need to coordinate and support learning with a variety of social services.
The Solutions Journalism Network, with support from the Walton Family Foundation, is offering grants to news organizations pursuing high-quality solutions reporting on both levels. We’re interested in coverage that examines immediate responses that essentially adapt the existing education system to the logistical demands of the pandemic, and also reporting that surfaces efforts to rethink the education system, introducing new ways of doing business.
Proposals could address questions such as:
- How are school districts addressing the broadband divide in distance learning?
- What are strategies to adapt special ed and ESL instruction?
- How are counseling and guidance functions being retooled for remote students?
- How can parents — notably those who must work outside the home — be supported?
Ideal proposals should include one or more of the following elements:
- Investigation and explanation of how communities, policy makers, public agencies, and other institutions have addressed similar problems.
- Use of data and/or research to report stories, providing evidence about the efficacy about the response being examined.
- A strategy for measuring impact, beginning with a clear goal for the story or project.
- Use of multimedia, data visualization or social media to tell stories.
- Engagement activities that connect the reporting to constructive public discourse.
Stories can be told in any number of formats. SJN welcomes shorter pieces as well as longer take-outs, investigative series, TV news segments or public affairs programming, radio pieces and podcasts, data visualizations and interactive maps.
Interested in applying? Be sure to read our handy application guide first. And check out the eligibility guidelines.
Submit your application via this link. We are accepting applications on an ongoing basis, however projects must be completed by May 31, 2021.
Please contact your region manager or Keith Hammonds (keith@solutionsjournalism.org) for more information.
How to contact SJN’s region managers:
Europe: Nina Fasciaux
Mid-Atlantic: Mikhael Simmonds
Middle West: Carolyn Robinson
Mountain West: Keith Hammonds
New England: Leah Todd
Pacific West: Michelle Faust Raghavan
South: Michael Davis
Visit SJN’s website for more information about the organization and solutions journalism. Our resources include the Solutions Story Tracker, a curated repository of thousands of solutions journalism stories from across the nation and the world. You can republish some of these stories for free as part of the SoJo Exchange.
