News
School Board No. 1
emmalee reed
Feb 16, 2020
It was intimidating, but went well, and I hope to cover more school board meetings in the future. I have a lot of room to grow.
I teamed up with Evan, another education reporter, to cover the meeting. I am glad that he was there with me because there was a lot of content in the meeting and it would have been difficult to cover all of it by myself, especially during my first meeting.
I am still getting in the swing of writing instead of photographing, and knew that it would take me a while to get my words down. I made sure to stay in the newsroom most of the day before the meeting to do some pre-writing and I'm glad that I did. I ended up with around 600 words of pre-writing, many of which ended up being cut, but all helped me to prepare. I also spent lots of time the day before looking at the meeting agenda and looking at the clips, which paid off because I felt like I understood what the board was talking about during the meeting and wasn't caught off-guard by any topic.
I took lots of notes during the meeting and felt good, but was a little bit frantic once returning to the newsroom. There was just so much discussed that had to be distilled into one article. There were also decisions made regarding what was important to include in the story and what wasn't. I am thankful for all of Hannah and Evan's help.
Here is the link to the final story: https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/k12_education/columbia-school-board-hears-really-encouraging-survey-results-for-district/article_97f9ce90-4c3b-11ea-98a4-c300ec3f7870.html.
