Commitment to Diversity

Because I am in a position of leadership within my program, it is especially important for me to showcase different student perspectives. My goal has always tell stories that would never otherwise be told—like Quinn Clark riding a unicycle to school or Dance Team competing at state.

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Throughout my experience as a student journalist, I have strived to talk to different people outside of my own comfort zone. For The Battle for the Phones, we intentionally sought out students who had their phone taken from them, as well as students who were for and against phone policies. But we didn't just stop at City High students. I reached out to friends in Chicago, Michigan, and Florida whose schools had recently instituted phone bans. My goal was to find out what school was like post-ban without actually having to experience it myself, since students at City weren't familiar with a ban yet. These perspectives from all across the country allowed The Battle for the Phones to stand out from every other feature story—we localized a national issue, but also incorporated other national perspectives on it.

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Tai Caputo and I did a similar thing in Targeted. While we interviewed people close to City High, like school board member Mitch Lingo and our principal, John Bacon, we also wanted to consider different perspectives from people not as involved in the school rating system. To do so, we interviewed a parent who had considered school ratings when choosing where to move to and a student at a school that was much smaller and ranked higher than City. 

In addition, we interviewed two other principals besides our own—Mitch Gross, the principal at West High, and Mike Hawley, the principal at Pleasant Valley. Both were able to give us valuable insight on how the school rankings affected their schools, and Tai and I were able to have wider contextual knowledge as a result. 

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While writing Brain Drain, I made sure to talk with students who wanted to stay in Iowa as well as leave. This perspective was especially important to me. I knew that I was mostly writing about a topic that involved students who wanted to leave Iowa, but wanted students who planned on staying to feel seen as well. Because a topic like brain drain isn't a all-or-nothing situation, it was important to get individual perspectives as well as an overall generalization. In addition, what I learned was that many students who wanted to stay were staying due to financial reasons—either they couldn't afford to go to college out of state, or weren't planning on going to college at all and it didn't make sense for them to leave when there were jobs in Iowa. It's easy to say, "oh, well, everybody is going to leave" while ignoring that many people do not have the means to leave, which is why it's an important viewpoint to consider.​​

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To write SNAP GETS SNAPPED: 2025 Government Shutdown Affects Students, I had to find a student whose family relied on food stamps who was willing to be interviewed. Many people were not, but one student, Ziggy Evans, was happy to discuss how the government shutdown had affected them. In my initial survey of City High students, I found that a lot of students didn't believe that people our age were actually affected by the government shutdown, which is why I thought it was especially important to write this article.