Keeping a 13-year reporting project going takes patience, compassion and lots of voicemails. That’s what I’ve learned in the almost six years I’ve been leading OPB’s Class of 2025.

When the project started, 12 years ago, the students were all at the same school, Earl Boyles Elementary School in Southeast Portland. But now it’s 2024 — and half of those students have moved from the school district where they started.

Mobility — changing schools, changing districts, changing cities — is relatively normal in a student’s educational life.

But when a student leaves one school, they don’t usually have a reporter follow them to the next one. For the first six years of the project, it was the job of OPB education reporter and creator of the Class of 2025 project Rob Manning to stay in touch with all the participating students and families. Rob tells me it wasn’t that hard, because most of the students were in one of a few different classrooms at Earl Boyles Elementary School.

Students changed schools almost immediately after the Class of 2025 project started. Raiden left Earl Boyles for another grade school in the David Douglas School District. Ethan’s mom pulled him out of Earl Boyles to homeschool him. Kalani moved into a Portland Public Schools elementary school. And Sam’s family moved south to Springfield. Right away, kids were spreading out.

As Class of 2025 students continued to leave the David Douglas School District, even in high school, OPB pledged to continue checking in with them as long as they wanted to continue their participation in the project.

The check-ins might be less frequent. Months or even years go by without a text or call back from a family. Once planned, sometimes visits require a rental car and a day of travel, like a recent trip to Class of 2025 student Sam and his dad Rodger, whom we hadn’t seen since the end of freshman year.

Other times, the check-ins are just phone calls or a couple of texts.

In movies and TV shows, you might see a reporter knocking on someone’s door, or showing up at someone’s job to interrogate them and ask them questions.

That has never been the approach with the Class of 2025. These students and families are not public officials we’re holding accountable; they’re “regular people” who signed up for a long-term reporting project over a decade ago. For the students, their involvement started when they were little kids and now they’re nearly adults. And though we sometimes ask tough questions, the constant in all of our conversations and check-ins is care and compassion.

But keeping a project going this long takes persistence and patience — two skills we got a lot of practice in once schools shut down in March 2020.

Pandemic creates new communication challenges

I took over most of the Class of 2025 project when I started at OPB in February 2019. Rob maintained relationships with the families that had already left David Douglas schools. I was tasked with staying in touch with the students still in the district who were now sixth graders at Ron Russell Middle School.

At the end of every school year, we conduct exit interviews with each student, asking how the year went, what their favorite classes were, and the perennial “Rob question:” What do you want to be when you grow up?

The sixth-grade exit interviews provided me with one of my first opportunities to get to know the students at Ron Russell. I asked about their families and what they liked to do in order to get beyond questions about their favorite teacher or subject in school.

When the Class of 2025 started seventh grade in the fall of 2019, I jumped right in, visiting Ron Russell weekly to try and get a sense of what was going on with these students, what they were learning, and what it was like being in the “middle of middle school.”

I always liked being there for lunch. It was the perfect opportunity to catch students laughing and being goofy with their friends. Class of 2025 students would introduce me as the person who follows them around while other students ask us if we’re from “the news” or “YouTube.”

By March 2020, I’d started reporting a new season of our Class of 2025 podcast, with a couple of planned videos to take our audience into middle school and show them how the skills students learn in English class set them up for the future.

But then schools closed. Suddenly, our plans had to change completely.

The videos were scrapped, and I had to jump into education reporter mode to cover schools closing, the beginning of distance learning, and all of the challenges facing students and staff.

It wasn’t until the summer of 2020 that I started trying to connect with the Class of 2025 students. The place I’d been accustomed to seeing them had closed. So now, I had to reach their parents — most of whom I’d never met or talked to before — while all of us were dealing with living in a pandemic.

This is where I will thank the Class of 2025 families for being so open and willing to talk to me or Rob in those tough first months. I got to know so many parents without ever met them before. We had long, off-the-record conversations that never made it into stories, just talking through how students and their families were faring, being stuck at home.

It took months to hear back from some parents, understandably. I still say it now: Most people do not have “respond to the OPB reporter” on their to-do lists.

But eventually, we heard back from families. They’d moved again. Or lost internet access. Or experienced a death in the family. But the Class of 2025 remained resilient and moved on from middle school — and distance learning.

Becoming a part of the Class of 2025′s lives

By the time the Class of 2025 started high school in 2021, it had been years since I’d seen some of them. They’d gotten taller or changed their hair, and masks covered their faces.

I spent the first day of high school at David Douglas, searching for a dozen students in the sea of hundreds of freshmen.

Similar to middle school, I tried to spend time at lunch checking in with students.

We’ve stayed in touch with most students even as they went back to online school or moved schools. A couple of students have decided to no longer participate. Others have been hard to get a hold of.

With some students, I now reach out to them and their parents in a group message, rather than just a parent. Some students have work obligations to schedule around. Some are able to drive themselves to our interviews.

There are so many memories and milestones OPB has seen in these students’ lives that don’t get a mention in our stories. We’ve met their pets, gushed over their prom photos, and applauded at their choir concerts. We’ve run into them at sporting events — and even been invited to their birthday parties. We’ve sympathized with their difficult times, and at times turned off the cameras and microphones when conversations have gotten too hard.

It’s been an honor to be a part of this ambitious project and help finish it with strong coverage not only of the students but of the educational system around them.

But it’s been a greater honor to get to know these students and their families, to be let into their lives, and to share their stories.

Rob Manning contributed to this story.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2024/09/28/class-of-2025-reporters-notebook-elizabeth-miller-rob-manning-education/