Ann here, taking a moment to brag about Eric Frazier. Today he's receiving The Thomas Wolfe Award, given by the Associated Press for the single best newspaper story in North Carolina from Oct. 1, 2009, to Sept. 30, 2010.
The award is for his Aug. 30 piece on Danquirs Franklin and Juwon Lewis, two young men who started with very similar lives and ended up on opposite academic paths. It's well deserved; Eric stuck with what started out as a simple article on CMS's school for at-risk ninth-graders and turned it into an amazing piece of storytelling. At a time when politics, policy and arguing adults tend to dominate the education scene, Eric's story was a poignant reminder of what it's all about.
A hat-tip is also due his editors, Mike Gordon and Cheryl Carpenter. I was close enough to this one to see the long process leading up to publication. Eric wrote several very good versions of this story, all of which I'd have been proud to publish. The editors kept kicking it back and demanding more. As you might guess, that is not something reporters particularly enjoy. But the result is the great story that finally saw print. Congratulations to all.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Kudos to Eric
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12 comments:
Congrats Eric. I remember the story. Though I had hoped it would have stirred the real need to address instead of the fancy dancy stuff these ED PhD's are coming up with.
Good description of the elephant in the room.
Not that most people didn't already know or that it will really matter (unless the people living this way decide to change themselves).
Which I don't think is very likely outside a few exceptions.
Well deserved - that was a powerful story!
TROTS...
Beyond the curb where school property ends, CMS' responsibility stops.
As Anon 3:41 said and I have also said countless times, it's the elephant in the room no one wants to talk about.
It's a very sad situation neither of these young men asked for outside of school and have dealt with their situations the best they could.
By all accounts, neither young man had a father in their lives. One had a grandmother trying to do her best to keep him straight and the other with a mother and grandmother in and out of jail.
Over the past several months, all we have heard from Kojo and the NAACP is how "they" aren't getting what "they" deserve. Nothing about any plans to curb situations such as Eric wrote about. No conversations about babies having babies, Black on Black crime, Black crime in general, low graduation rates for Blacks and the lack of Black male heads of households.
Until the NAACP and the Black community at large aggressively tackles these issues, that elephant will continue to occupy the same space it has for decades.
What a great (and tragic) story.
Well said, Wiley. Could someone please pass these comments on to Kojo.
And congratulations to Eric!
Exactly Wiley. Maybe we need to go to BOE meetings and BOCC meetings and hold up pictures of elephants.
Congratulations Eric!
For the poster with holding up elephants, lets hope that your face isn't on the back of it. Like it or not..we are all in this together.
Anon 5:35...
You're right about one thing.
I don't like it and refuse to hop on the same status quo bandwagon many people have been riding on for decades.
The time for waste, fraud, throwing good money after bad and excuses is over.
Eliminate the excuses!
Anon 5:35, while you think we all may be in this together, the sad fact is only a few of us are pulling the wagon. More and more are looking to get a free ride without their share of pulling.
Thanks Ann! And thanks to everyone for the kind words. As Ann mentioned, it was a tough story to tell, in large part because I wanted to get at a lot of these broader, deep-seated social/family problems that so many of CMS' kids (and by extension their schools) are struggling with. The real power of journalism, especially newspaper journalism, has always been its ability to every now and then go deep on a story, to open a window onto real people's lives, and just let you take a good, long look. I'm really glad you guys enjoyed the story.
Dear Mr. Frazier,
Congrats on your award. I had no idea stories took that long to write. I enjoyed (that doesn't seem like the right word) your story and also the embedded links to further stories. Will there be another one: "Where Are They Now?" I want to be like Ms. Boyd: Looking to the future and having hope that it will turn out well.
Thank you.
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