Public records lead to illuminating stories that would be hard to find otherwise, and the coronavirus pandemic is no exception. Government agencies, including public schools, are obligated to provide access to data, communications and other records under each state’s freedom-of-information law.

(Recommended reading: Last fall, Frank LoMonte of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida wrote a great student journalist’s primer on public records for The Lead.)

Here are some ideas to get you started and bolster your pandemic reporting.

The basics

This letter generator from the Student Press Law Center includes boilerplate language to help you file a request. You’ll want to contact your school or district’s custodian of records. (Unfortunately, options are more limited for private schools or universities.)

MuckRock is an excellent free service that will help you find relevant contacts at agencies and view requests other journalists have filed. Keep track of your requests using MuckRock or your own spreadsheet, and make a note of when you want to follow up.

Be specific in your request! A request for all of your university president’s emails from March will be costly and take a long time to fulfill. A request for emails between your university president and the mayor for a time frame of a few days is more realistic.

Records to request

Investigative Reporters and Editors has hosted webinars on investigating higher education and fighting for public records during the pandemic. Watch them for helpful tips from reporters. Here are a few ideas for requests:

• Your school/district’s contingency plans for pandemics
• Results to any campus surveys about the school’s pandemic response
• Communications between campus leaders and local officials in the time period where schools stopped in-person classes
• Internal communication plans or talking points about the pandemic and the school’s response
• Communications between campus leaders and local officials regarding plans for the fall semester
• Daily/weekly internal situation reports
• Communications about budget shortfalls and how schools plan to deal with them

Dealing with pushback

Be considerate in your interactions with records custodians. They’re also adjusting to life in a pandemic and a new work routine.

Your school might cite FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, to try to deny records. The law is often misused to limit student journalists’ access to information, and the Department of Education recently released new guidelines for information schools can legally disclose regarding the coronavirus.

There might be legitimate reasons for delays in records, though. More than two-thirds of states have made emergency modifications to their Freedom of Information Act laws, the Student Press Law Center reports. If campuses are working with limited staffing, staff may not be able to access the records you’ve requested.

One tool we love

Expand your data journalism skills with a free online “academy” from MaryJo Webster, a data journalist at The (Minneapolis) Star Tribune. “There’s a mix of videos, exercises, tipsheets and reading materials to introduce you to both how to work with data, but also some of the bigger concepts you also need to learn, like finding and requesting data and dealing with problems in your data and incorporating this work into a beat,” she writes. The exercises focus on working with data in Microsoft Excel but also introduce the programming language R.

What’s your favorite tool that other student journalists should know about? Email me and I might feature it in a future issue.

One story worth reading

The coronavirus pandemic has let student journalists do what they do best: Use their access and perspective to cover their schools with granular detail that local media isn’t always able to provide, Michael Izquierdo reports for The New School Free Press. “It felt like we had to grow a little bit as journalists and as people overnight,” an editor at New York University’s Washington Square News told Izquierdo.

Opportunities and trainings

• The Native American Journalism Fellowship for college students includes a reporting immersion at the National Native Media Conference, mentorship and trainings. Apply by May 31.
• BigPicture is giving two $2,500 grants to photographers between the ages of 18 and 25. Apply here by May 31.
• The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and the National Federation of Community Broadcasters are offering free weekly online trainings starting in June. View the sessions and register here.
• College students and recent graduates, apply for NPR’s Next Generation Radio Project, a weeklong audio journalism training program at locations around the country.
• Apply for the Ian Parry Scholarship for photojournalists by July 5.
• The Student Media Virtual Bootcamp will provide two weeks of training from three college media organizations from July 20-30. Learn about the tracks and register here.

💌 Last week’s newsletter: The Minnesota Daily adapted its annual photo project for the pandemic

📣 I want to hear from you. What would you like to see in the newsletter? Have a cool project to share? Email blatchfordtaylor@gmail.com.

Taylor Blatchford is a journalist at The Seattle Times who independently writes The Lead, a newsletter for student journalists. She can be reached at blatchfordtaylor@gmail.com or on Twitter @blatchfordtr.