George Santos won election to Congress in New York last November — but he probably never would have been able to win a school board seat in Maryland.
That’s because students at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland would have likely outed him as a fraud before voters ever went to the polls.
Ninety-six students at Maryland spent the fall immersed in a new program called the Local News Network, which was designed to teach them the basic elements of local news reporting — such as vetting political candidates. After nearly 40 years as a reporter, I was hired to lead the program and convert our second-year reporting class into a learning lab that produced real journalism.
Our first project called on students to do background checks on the state’s 155 school board candidates, and sure enough, those young journalists turned up some things that voters needed to know. And in doing so, these students got a life lesson in the importance of local news coverage while using a template for improving it in this era of shrinking newsrooms.
It’s a template that any college journalism program could use for any election.
The project began with a candidate survey. Candidates were asked basic questions about their background as well as their thoughts on the top education issues. Predictably, some candidates ignored the survey — but then students reached out to those who didn’t respond and asked them to either do so or agree to be interviewed. In the end, more than 100 of the candidates complied.
Students also did background checks on all 155 candidates. Students called the candidates’ colleges to see if the candidates really graduated. They called the candidates’ employers to see if they really worked there. They ran the names of the school board candidates through the Maryland court records system.
In other words, they did the kind of reporting The New York Times did that eventually revealed Santos to be a serial fabulist, albeit after the election.
One of the students, Khushboo Rathore, got assigned to vet Julie Brown, a self-proclaimed “advocate for parental rights” who finished first in the July primary in a largely rural district in southern Maryland. By delving deep into Brown’s background, Rathore showed the importance of finding out who political candidates really are.
Rathore quickly discovered that to police and prosecutors in southern Maryland, Julie Brown was also known as Julie Lee Higgs and Julie Lee Melton Higgs — and that she had a rather curious personal history for a family values candidate.
“Voters in Charles County are coming to know her as Julie Brown, the 57-year-old grandmother of two who says she’s running for the Board of Education in District 2 as ‘an advocate for parental rights,’” Rathore wrote.
“But to the Charles County Sheriff’s Office, the woman who lives at the address in Indian Head that Brown listed with the Board of Elections is Julie Lee Higgs. Police say Higgs gave her mother’s name — Patricia Lee Brown — instead of her own during a 2016 traffic stop in hopes of avoiding prosecution.
“Meanwhile, La Plata Police officers know Julie Lee Melton Higgs, who shares an address and birthday with Brown and who was accused of shoplifting a pair of baby shoes from a Target in 2019 and hundreds of dollars worth of items both before and after that.”
Rathore’s story ran both on Merrill College’s Capital News Service website and in the Southern Maryland Chronicle the week before the general election — in which Brown ended up finishing third.
Brown’s story wasn’t the only good one the students found. They identified a dozen school board candidates with histories of not paying their taxes on time. That story, by students Marwa Barakat and Stephanie Quinn, appeared in news outlets across the state, including The Baltimore Sun. Other students produced pre-election enterprise stories on learning loss, the teacher shortage, school safety and other issues, which also ran statewide.
Meantime, the student-produced school board voter guide attracted a record number of hits on the Capital News Service website.
“Traffic increased fairly dramatically on Election Day,” said Alexander Pyles, director of the audience engagement bureau for Capital News Service. “A lot of frantic Googling, perhaps, while waiting in line to vote.”
There you have it: There is still an appetite for solid local news coverage even though the economic model that once produced such content remains broken.
The Local News Network’s school board project proves something else, too: that journalism schools can help fill the gaps left by the deep cuts in local news staffing.
Merrill College and two of its generous philanthropists created the Local News Network last summer to do just that – and our model is entirely replicable. Any journalism school anywhere in the country could assign students to vet school board candidates. Or city council candidates. Or potential state legislators. Or people running for Congress.
By doing so, journalism schools would be teaching their students valuable skills they can use throughout their careers. And if journalism schools share the students’ work with news outlets, as we did at the University of Maryland, those schools would be performing a valuable public service, too.
And who knows? Some student somewhere might even find the next George Santos before they ever get a single vote.
