School board voter guide starter kits helps NJ local news outlets, voters dig deeper
When Danielle DeGerolamo received a $500 stipend to help elevate her local school board election coverage, she chose to spend it on the six candidates running for three open seats on the Phillipsburg Board of Education.
The editor of TAPinto Phillipsburg conducted a series of 30-minute in-person interviews with each candidate that revealed how much each one did — and did not — know about pressing matters facing local schools. She then treated each one to coffee with a constituent at a local café so they could hear voters’ concerns firsthand.
Solving the ongoing shortage of paraprofessionals and school bus drivers? Adapting the school curriculum to include contemporary issues such as climate change, social justice, and technology?
“Some had zero knowledge, some were well versed,” said DeGerolamo, whose outlet is the only local news organization that regularly covers Phillipsburg school board meetings. “Voters look for fresh faces, but are they the right faces when they don’t know their role as a board member?”
“Two of the candidates told me they learned more talking to me during the interview than attending meetings and intended to research more thoroughly each subject to learn more.”
In a year when school board races turned into heated debates about what is taught — and not taught — in New Jersey’s public schools and how much to pay for that education, more than a dozen community news outlets across the Garden State took their Board of Education election coverage to the next level, using a starter kit developed by the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University.
The school board voting guide starter kit was part of NJ Decides 2024, a multi-faceted initiative to keep New Jersey voters informed about this year’s elections.
The collaborative project, funded by a grant from the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, also included five reporting fellows from New Jersey ethnic media outlets who covered the 2024 general elections and a comprehensive voting guide on the state’s candidates for the U.S. Congress and Senate all published by NJ Spotlight News.
Local news outlets created custom 2024 voter guides about school board candidates in their respective local districts by accessing an easy-to-use kit. The kit included a questionnaire for local news outlets to send to each school board candidate and instructions for how to easily access their answers and build a voter guide.
The Center also awarded reporting stipends of $500 to give small news organizations a little extra capacity to produce their voter guides in addition to going the extra mile to foster a thoughtful dialogue among candidates and voters.
Matt Skoufalos, editor of NJ Pen, which covers suburban Camden, said the toolkit helped him corral candidates in Cherry Hill and Pennsauken. In fact, five of the Cherry Hill candidates ignored his outreach until they received the form from the toolkit. Two candidates still have not responded as of this writing.
Chasing down candidates for answers, covering school bond referendums in Collingswood and Haddonfield, and staying on top of other races is next to impossible, he said.
“The volume of work involved in elections coverage is staggering,” said Skoufalos. “Support for election reporting and service journalism is quite welcome because we have a ton of election issues in a short time period.”
Skoufalos said the added layers of monied campaigns and the need to explain candidates’ individual cultural and moral views on social issues also require more capacity for reporters.
“I think the more attention that we can continue to pay as journalists to policies over politics, the more our readers will benefit,” he said. “Without access to clean information about these things, misinformation, rumor, and wild counterprogramming abound. It’s our job to clear that up as best we can for the sake of everyone involved.”
In addition to TAPinto Phillipsburg and NJ Pen, check out the school board voting guides from these 10 other New Jersey outlets:
- Ridge View Echo, Blairstown, Frelinghuysen, Hardwick and Knowlton
- Banana Tree News, Glen Rock
- TAPinto Neptune, Neptune
- The Clifton Times, Clifton
- TAPinto Hamilton and Robbinsville, Hamilton and Robbinsville
- TAPinto Milltown/Spotswood, Milltown and Spotswood
- TAPinto East Brunswick, East Brunswick
- TAPinto Paterson, Passaic Valley, Paterson, Little Falls and Woodland Park
- Planet Princeton, Princeton
- 70and73, Cherry Hill, Evesham/Marlton, Medford, Medford Lakes, Moorestown, Mount Laurel, Voorhees
Manya Brachear Pashman is the project coordinator of the NJ Decides 2024 collaboration at the Center for Cooperative Media. She can be reached via email at elections@centerforcooperativemedia.org.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a primarily grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism and support an informed society in New Jersey and beyond. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, the Independence Public Media Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, Inasmuch Foundation and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. For more information, visit centerforcooperativemedia.org.
