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The Kansan’s editors were so supportive of the story that instead of putting it on the front page of the paper, it was published in full on the paper’s website and shared in the state’s special education section for the Brown v. Still, Frey and Breckunitch worked until they had more than 100 inches of copy for their editors to review. This story, he noted, was harder because “I knew people didn’t want to talk about this.” “I’ve covered a mass shooting, and while that was emotionally draining, it wasn’t hard because people wanted to talk,” Frey said. It also allowed him to break up the emotional drain of such a complex story. “Stories like this are tough when you really are part of the community.”įrey worked through his anxieties by spending extra time working on the story – he started showing up to the office 10 minutes earlier and set aside time whenever the opportunity presented itself. “I have three kids in the school system, and I would lay awake at night wondering how a story like this would impact them,” he said. He looked to neighbors and friends to help him understand the institutional racism inherent in even non-segregated schools, and how he could tactfully approach these subjects as a person speaking from a place of privilege.īut Frey also wanted to be sensitive because he lives and works in a very small community.
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He turned to community members regularly for help understanding the various points of view in his town and how to cover such a hot-button issue. Out of more than 300 teachers reported, only three are African American and two are Hispanic.”Įven with the obvious importance of the story, Frey said tackling such a big issue wasn’t easy. As they noted in their article, “There are 15 building administrators and only one of those is African American. When Frey and Breckunitch began digging into the situation, they found that during the 2018-2019 school year, 97 percent of the staff of the Newton School District was white, while more than 30 percent of the students were non-white.
But while we were never ‘segregated,’ there was segregation.” Unlike other cities in Kansas, Frey explained, “Newton has a population of 20,000, so it didn’t have the money for segregated schools. “It seemed like a natural fit when you talk about Brown v. Frey knew he had his hook – he partnered with colleague Kelly Breckunitch to tackle it. Board of Education decision approached, the state of Kansas reached out to newsrooms asking for stories about integration in the decades since the landmark case. When the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Unsure of how to get started, Frey began attending racial justice meetings in the community and learning from his neighbors “what it’s like living in Newton while not white.” The stories he heard left an impression on him, and he realized that many of the stories about segregation and racial inequality in Newton were from decades earlier and people with firsthand experience of modern racism weren’t seeing their stories told. “I always wondered what it would be like if we looked at who’s teaching our kids,” Frey said. The idea of writing about the racial breakdown of Newton was something reporter Chad Frey had long wanted to tackle, and that seed of an idea lived on The Kansan’s “grandiose ideas” board at the back of the newsroom. For reporters at The Newton Kansan, this discrepancy is an essential story for their community – and one they believe every community newspaper should be tracking. In Newton, Kansas, less than 3 percent of teachers are non-white, while the student body is 38 percent non-white.
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