To help journalists cover the nuances and complexities of public policies that affect children and the changes in child well-being, the National Press Foundation is offering three unique but related fellowships in 2023-2024.

The first reporting workshops were in McAllen, Texas from Jan. 22-25, 2023, and Cleveland, Ohio from May 7-10, 2023. The final workshop was in Charlotte, North Carolina Jan. 21-24, 2024. See the 16 selected Charlotte journalists here.

The National Press Foundation training model is free and on the record. As such, we offer recaps of each session here. Follow the links to see videos, slides, transcripts and additional resources from all of NPF’s expert speakers.

What Journalists Learned in Charlotte

This fellowship explored a range of relevant topics, including economic security for children and families, post-COVID child health and education, child welfare reform, and reimagining juvenile justice.

Breaking the Systemic Chains of Child and Family Poverty with Toussaint Romain, CEO, Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy:

• Romain launched a historical exploration into the roots of America’s racist policies, suggesting that the American socio-economic system and its stratification by race and class are yielding the intended results.
• Through a series of slides and interactive exercises, Romain asked the journalists to imagine the American story if the central characters – Black and white Americans – reversed roles. Would white families face as many financial barriers and generational deficits as many Black families do?
• Romain cautioned journalists to not lose sight of the pivotal role that economic power and control have played in the overall well-being of millions of Americans throughout this nation’s history.

Keynote: How Economic Stability Fuels Child Wellbeing with Kim Janey, President & CEO, Economic Mobility Pathways (EMPath) and Former Mayor and City Councilor, District 7, City of Boston:

• Janey was on the front lines of the battle to desegregate Boston’s schools, facing rocks and racial slurs during Boston’s busing era in the 1970s.
• Journalists who write about poverty need to know poverty is not about individual choices, Janey said. “And how we write about it, how we talk about it, it all matters.”
• Use an equity lens when reporting, she admonished fellows, and understand how important lived expertise is.

The State of American Babies: Zero to Three’s Report with Patricia Cole, Senior Director of Federal Policy, ZERO TO THREE:

• Most journalists who’ve covered child development over the past decade are at least vaguely familiar with the physiological significance of the first three years of life.
• Research shows there’s a growing crisis for babies in many states due to decreased funding for Supplemental Nutrition for Women, Infants and Children or WIC programs.

Quality Early Education for All: The AppleTree Institute Formula with Jamie Miles, Chief of Schools, AppleTree Early Learning Public Charter School, and Anne Malone, Chief of Growth & Impact, AppleTree Institute for Education Innovation:

• AppleTree offers free education to three- and four-year-olds, regardless of their zip code, economic status, race or creed.
• While AppleTree schools exist in cities like New York and St. Louis, Washington D.C. is the largest cohort. AppleTree Early Learning educates 630 kids across 12 campuses in D.C.
• There’s been a drop in enrollment since COVID, and while AppleTree is seeing an increase in numbers, they’re not back to pre-COVID numbers.

Shifting the Lens on Homeschooling with Laura Meckler, National Education Writer, The Washington Post, and Peter Jamison, Reporter, The Washington Post:

• Meckler said there has been a 51% net rise in homeschooling since 2017-18.
• In the article “Homeschooling today is less religious and more diverse, poll finds,” data shows that religious instruction as reasoning dropped from 63% in 2012 to 24% in 2023.
• Journalists writing about homeschooling can also look at the monetary incentive for homeschooling – where in some cases, families can get up to $9,000 per child to homeschool.

Keeping Kids Healthy: Reversing the Medicaid Disappearing Act with Joan Alker, Professor and Executive Director/Co-Founder, Center for Children and Families, Georgetown University:

• The number of children on Medicaid went up – from 49% to 54%. But in March 2023, states were allowed to dis-enroll people.
• Texas, California and Florida have the largest decrease in Medicaid enrollment.
• A lot of the children who are losing Medicaid are still eligible, said Alker. The eligibility levels for Medicaid and CHIP together is a median of 250% of the poverty level across the country.

Identifying the Barriers to Education: The AP’s School Absenteeism Reporting Project with Bianca Vázquez Toness, National Education Reporter, The Associated Press:

• An astonishing 230,000 kids were missing from schools in 21 states
• California, New York, Louisiana, North Carolina and Washington State had the most missing kids,
• Toness said she talked to teachers and principals, attendance specialists, religious leaders, tenant organizations, low-income housing developments and parent advocates – whom she said are an incredibly helpful resource.

Transforming Child Welfare Systems from Within with Charles Bradley, Division Director, Mecklenburg County (North Carolina) Department of Social Services:

• Possibly the most critical step toward transforming foster care systems has been the acknowledgment of the role race has played in out-of-home placements over the past few decades, Bradley said.
• “What we find is that there’s not a balance in that reporting, that the racial equity lens that people use is that many times social services is for referring families of color and not serving our white community,” Bradley said.

“On the Threshold of Change: The Strategies for Transforming Foster Care” Report with Jennifer Rodriguez, Executive Director, Youth Law Center:

• The path from foster care only leads to another traumatic destination: the juvenile justice system, Rodriguez said.
• By partnering with the Institute for the Future and the California Youth Connection, the Youth Law Center produced a deep-dive exploration into the experiences and prospects of young people leaving California’s foster care system.
• California was one of the first states to extend foster care benefits beyond age 18, after 2008 federal legislation provided matching funds for services that would be capped at age 21.

Why the Juvenile Justice System Keeps Falling: The Kids of Rutherford County Podcast with Meribah Knight, Senior Reporter & Producer, Nashville Public Radio:

• Children were getting charged with crimes like kids running away, smoking, drinking underage and not going to school.
• In one of the first complaints, Knight saw a judge who allegedly told the police to arrest kids, and once arrested, they go to the jail and wait.
• About 10 months after the arrest of those kids, the police department decided to investigate itself, Knight said.

The Promise and Potential of the Child Tax Credit with Karen Chatfield, Director, Family Economic Security, National Center for Children in Poverty:

• When families living in states with these generous CTC programs get a lump-sum refund, even if they have no income or very little income, it can be a really important time for them, Chatfield said.
• Regardless of political affiliation or concerns about providing cash payments that might be misused, Chatfield says the CTC allowed many parents to pay for child care so that they could seek or keep employment.

Centering Children and Families in Reporting: A Local Perspective with Ely Portillo, Interim Executive Editor, 90.7 WFAE, and Janet Singerman, President & CEO, Child Care Resources Inc:

• “Childcare is a story about economic development,” Portillo said.
• Childcare workers are consistently the lowest, often the very lowest paid among professions that require any sort of qualifications or expertise.
• The federal government stepped in and provided $24 billion nationally in emergency funding as part of the American Rescue Plan – North Carolina received about $1.76 million.

What Journalists Learned in McAllen

This fellowship explored McAllen as one of the nation’s epicenters of child poverty: 16% of all U.S. children lived in poverty in 2020, but in the Hildago County region, where McAllen is located, it was 42%. McAllen is also located 11 miles from the Mexican border, making it an important location from which to investigate the impact of immigration policies on children, and 274 miles from Uvalde, where the effects of the May 24 school shooting continue to reverberate.

Keynote: Trading Trauma for a Hopeful Future with Manny García, editor-in-chief of the Austin American-Statesman:

• Newsroom managers must acknowledge how breaking news coverage affects staffers.
• Journalism schools haven’t figured out how to prepare reporters for traumatic assignments.
• Informing the public means the entire public (why the Statesman translated Texas’ report into Spanish).
• Traumatized communities deserve the truth.
• Without context, communities can drown in negativity.

Heeding the Messages from Gun Violence Data with Nirmita Panchal, senior policy analyst at Kaiser Family Foundation:

• Children of color are disproportionately harmed by gun violence.
• The mental health impacts of shootings on children can’t be overstated.
• Increased access to firearms is directly related to higher suicide rates.
• Analyze which policies to address the problem are working and which aren’t.

Navigating Grief and Trauma in Our Children with David J. Schonfeld, founder and director of the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement:

• School shootings should not be considered the “new normal.”
• Grief is a universal experience, but it can intersect with other challenges.
• Be aware of compassion fatigue and vicarious traumatization.
• “How do we promote post-traumatic growth?” And other story ideas to consider.
• Schools should be able to “build back better” after major traumatic events.

Responding to Trauma in Immigrant Children with Monica Romo, senior program coordinator for Girasol at the Texas Institute for Child & Family Wellbeing:

• Trauma is the response to the event, not the event itself.
• Immigrant children experience trauma throughout their journeys.
• Create safety for traumatized people.
• Take care of yourself, too.

Through The Eyes of a Child with Sister Norma Pimentel, executive director of the Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley:

• Whoever has the microphone gets to shape public perception about immigrants.
• Immigrant children, like all children, need the time and space to play.
• Accurate reporting impacts the public perception of immigrants.

Defending Immigrant Children’s Rights with Dalia Castillo-Granados, co-founder and director of the Children’s Immigration Law Academy, and Aimee Korolev, legal director at the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project:

• The label “unaccompanied children” is relatively new in immigration circles.
• Resettlement shelters are detention centers.
• Children immigrate to the U.S. for a variety of reasons.
• Unaccompanied youth need help in understanding the laws around immigration.

Covering Health Care for Undocumented Families with Children’s Defense Fund – Texas deputy director Michelle Castillo and communications director Cindy Ji.

• Over 248,00 children were disenrolled from Medicaid by their parents between 2017 and 2020.

Historic ‘Yes’ Vote for Early Child Care with Sharon Kayne, communications director for New Mexico Voices for Children:

• The U.S. lags behind other developed nations in “cradle to career” education policy.
• Immigrant families are most vulnerable to gaps in early child care.

An Up-Close Review of Remote Learning with Grady Wilburn, research statistician at the National Center for Education Statistics

• Math scores were most affected.
• Reading scores declined too, especially for girls.
• English learners in eighth grade improved compared to 2019.
• Lower scores don’t have to mean educational doom.

The Cost of COVID: Education Funding Explained with Ash Dhammani, policy and data analyst at Edunomics Lab of Georgetown University

• Spending per student varies by state and by school district.
• Schools receive their funding from a mix of federal, state and local sources.
• Just because a school spends more per student does not necessarily mean it is more successful.
• Learning loss from the pandemic could reduce students’ lifetime earnings by as much as $70,000.

Dismantling Child Welfare: The Way Forward? with Alan Dettlaff, professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work:

• Most removals of children could be eliminated by providing financial support to families.
• Three big myths fuel the way the system runs.
• There can be more harm in removing children from their families.
• The system can’t provide the kind of help most families need.

Letting Extended Family Help Children Heal with Valerie D. Jackson, founder and CEO of Monarch Family Services, The Adolescent Center and Mental Health Services, and Initiatives for Healthy Communities:

• The family should remain at the center of all child welfare cases.
• America has a tortured history of separating children from families.
• It’s impossible to overstate the trauma children can experience in foster care.
• The kinship care movement is gaining some high-profile momentum.
• Kinship care can strengthen cultural connections in communities.

The Path Toward Authentic Juvenile Justice with Ruth Rosenthal, senior manager of Pew Charitable Trusts’ Safety and Justice portfolio and Christina Quaranta, executive director of the Connecticut Justice Alliance:

• Some teachers rely on law enforcement for classroom management, which causes youth over-policing.
• Zero-tolerance policies can lead to over-reporting child misconduct. Start with national data, then zoom in to the state level.

What Journalists Learned in Cleveland

Cleveland hosts two of the nation’s leading medical and research centers – the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital – from which the fellows received high-level briefings on child health and development from expert practitioners. Cleveland also grapples with many of the nation’s key challenges to child well-being: significant rates of poverty, youth violence and food insecurity.

Keynote: Transforming Foster Care: An Audacious Goal with Sixto Cancel, founder and CEO of Think of Us:

• Too many foster care youth leave the system with no training or support.

The Top-Level View of Foster Care Reform with Rebecca Jones Gaston, commissioner of the Administration for Children and Families within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:

• The child welfare system was not designed to keep families together.
• Acknowledge the harm.
• Solutions come from the communities, not conference rooms.
• Numbers and percentages don’t tell the whole story.
• The role of the mandatory reporter is needed, but it’s complicated.

The State-Level Challenges of Child Welfare Reform with Fred Wulczyn, Senior Research Fellow at Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago and the Director of the Center for State Child Welfare Data and LeeAnne Cornyn, deputy chief of staff for Ohio Governor Mike DeWine:

• Children in Ohio were dramatically impacted by the opioid epidemic.
• The state child welfare system wasn’t equipped to handle the repercussions.
• State child welfare departments don’t operate from the same playbooks.
• Statistics can yield positive news, too.
• People who’ve lived the data are the best sources of advice.
• While focusing on persistent problems, recognize new patterns.

Real Talk About Why American Children Are Obese with Roy Kim, head of Pediatric Endocrinology at Cleveland Clinic Children’s Hospital:

• Obesity goes beyond lifestyle choices.
• Obesity disproportionately affects lower-income households.
• Obesity has wide-ranging effects.
• Stigma hinders progress.
• Prevention is the best treatment.

A Steady Diet of Food Justice with Morgan Taggart, Director of Food Access Raises Everyone (FARE):

• The four main dimensions of food security and other key terms to know.
• GIS (geographic information systems) can help with food access if used strategically.
• School meals are available, but is that good enough?
• Corner and convenience stores lack produce and other healthy, affordable options.
• Structural racism exists within urban agriculture.

Navigating LGBTQ+ Legislation Coverage with Andrew DeMillo, Capitol Correspondent for the Little Rock bureau of The Associated Press:

• Keep abreast of the trends.
• Highlight the people affected.
• Explain to transgender sources the level of exposure they might receive from coverage.
• Avoid false balance.
• Protect yourself from negative attacks.

Long COVID in Children: An Open Question with Dr. David Miller and Dr. Amy Edwards, physicians in the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at University Hospital:

• Long COVID is not just one thing.
• Children and adults experience long COVID differently.
• Varying definitions of long COVID hinder research.
• Long COVID in children can have disastrous effects on their long-term development.
• Treating long COVID is difficult logistically and financially.
• Currently, only privileged patients receive care for long COVID.

It Takes a Village to Raise Healthy Children with Dr. Roopa Thakur, pediatrician and associate program director of the Pediatric Residency Program at Cleveland Clinic Children’s Hospital:

• Meet children where they are.
• Food security is a community responsibility.
• Group healthcare can yield better results for everyone.
• Partnerships between the medical and legal professions can improve outcomes for patients.

Building Anti-Fragility in Child Victims of Violence with Dr. Edward Barksdale, chief pediatric surgeon at University Hospitals:

• Strength can come from trauma.
• It’s about community, equity, prevention, opportunity and care.
• Rapid response is critically important.
• Giving people access to urgently needed resources is key.

Back to School After COVID — Where Are the Children? with Thomas Dee, professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education:

• There have been “dramatic declines” in student performance.
• Kindergarten enrollment was most affected.
• Where did the kids go?
• What do academic recovery efforts look like?
• There is a critical need for better data.

Testing the Impact of School Takeovers with Domingo Morel, associate professor of political science and public service at New York University

• What is a school takeover?
• Takeovers do not guarantee improved educational outcomes.
• Takeovers primarily occur in communities of color.
• Republican administrations are often the driving force behind school takeovers.

The Troubling ‘Patchwork’ of U.S. Child Labor Laws with Jennifer Sherer, senior state policy coordinator for the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN) Worker Power Project of the Economic Policy Institute:

• Youth who want to work can work.
• Historically, child labor laws have been imbalanced.
• When children do work, they often receive low wages.
• Child labor and access to education go hand in hand.

Getting to the Root of the Juvenile Justice Story with Rachel Dissell, Community + Special Projects Editor at Signal Cleveland and The Marshall Project–Cleveland:

• Lead-free homes weren’t publicly traceable. 
• Poverty is often the common denominator for youth in the system.
• Ask the community what they want to know.