Grab a cup of coffee — and meet the Ed Lab on Fridays

The Education Lab is a local journalism initiative that highlights education issues critical to the advancement of the San Joaquin Valley. It is funded by donors. Learn about The Bee’s Education Lab here.

Hi, Central Valley!

We want to hear from you. The Fresno Bee Education Lab Editor Rob Parsons and I will be holding open coffee hours at the Fresno State Starbucks, located on the second floor in the Henry Madden Library for the next four weeks.

Meet the Ed Lab. Here’s where

What: Tell us about the education issues you want to cover

Where: Henry Madden Library, 5150 N. Maple Ave. in Fresno.

When: 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Friday, Feb. 21; and Feb. 28, March 6, and March 13

These open coffee hours are another form of engagement journalism. Our goal is to give communities an avenue to participate in our reporting, an ongoing process that already has informed our reporting.

Late last week, the Ed Lab’s Monica Velez reported hundreds of Fresno college students — many of them low-income and people of color — will lose their ride to school when the free bus pass program ends in May. Check her story out here.

We are working on a story about lactation rooms in Fresno County schools after a meeting we had with a community leader.

We also are focusing our efforts on exploring the issue of discipline in schools, a topic chosen after more than 200 readers told us in our community survey this was a top concern. You can read more about the survey results here.

We are looking to do stories that don’t just focus on challenges, but also on the potential solutions communities, teachers and schools are exploring to overcome those challenges.

A recent example of this kind of reporting was our story on the CART program. One of the questions we’ve heard more than once relates to improving high school test scores. Students from Fresno and Clovis who participate in the CART program tend to score higher than their classmates outside the program on some tests. You can read our report here.

If you want to learn more about Engagement journalism, check out this great piece from ProPublica Engagement Reporter Beena Raghavendran at the Nieman Lab. And this story from Engagement Reporter Ariana Tobin who is also from ProPublica.

This story was originally published February 20, 2020 at 5:00 AM.