I had the chance to meet up with two friends from my Poynter fellowship last summer this past weekend. They were in town for the 2011 Computer-Assisted Reporting (CAR) conference in Raleigh, N.C. Unfortunately I couldn’t attend, but I was able to gain some second-hand knowledge from my friend Katelyn Polantz, an education reporter for the Roanoke Times.
As an education reporter, she was obviously drawn to the session looking into education databases. One of the databases mentioned, the Common Core of Data from the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, has a wealth of information on public school districts and their respective K-12 schools. I decided to take a jog down memory lane and pull data from the fine public school that gave me my diploma—Pine-Richland High School.
Now, we always joked that we lived in a white picket fence-type “bubble”—and the demographic data certainly supports that notion. Out of 1,442 total high school students in grades 9-12, there is/are: