The Lawrence Times is launching a community network to help us better cover all things newsworthy within Lawrence Public Schools.
Our goal is to report on Lawrence Public Schools as completely as possible, and that includes a lot of things. We know there are problems in schools — for instance, serious issues with heating systems plaguing some classrooms this week. But there are also a lot of incredible things happening, such as the group of Lawrence High student journalists recently recognized for their courage in standing up for freedom of the press.
Our goal is to raise awareness and push for accountability when the bad things happen, and to highlight the many great things that people are doing — especially when it’s our youngest community members behind them.
That work starts with us simply finding out about things. Although we’re still a tiny news team and we won’t always have the resources to cover every story, we want to cover as many as we can — but we definitely can’t cover things we don’t know about.
That’s where you come in. Many of our most important stories have started with a single tip from a reader.
One way we’d like to use this network might be to send out a quick email to everybody and ask if they’re aware of certain issues happening in their buildings, so we can more quickly pick up on patterns. For instance, when we learned about the issues with heating systems this week, we were pretty quickly able to learn from sources that there were issues beyond the three schools the district addressed in initial correspondence. Before publication time, we had learned of two additional schools having issues, and thanks to more district families, we’re learning about more today.
We’d also love to hear about the victories big and small of students, classes, teachers and more. Some of our favorite articles are about the amazing things students and faculty are doing. We want to celebrate, too.
Whether your contribution to our network is as simple as forwarding an important email to us or letting us know about a cool project your kid’s class is doing, or as complex as sending us regular updates about what’s going on at a school, your help will be very much appreciated.
Please join us!
If you’re interested in helping inform our news team, please fill out the form below (or visit the form at lawrenceks.news/lt497networkform).
The form is not a commitment to do anything — just a quick note to say “Hey there! I’m interested in this, and your team can contact me.”
And if you’re not sure that you’re interested right now, that’s no problem — we’ll be around when you’re ready!
Your privacy and your family’s privacy are essential. We will never share your information outside of our news team without your permission.
We know it can be scary to speak out, especially if you think your job could be in danger. We would never reveal our sources without their consent — and as journalists, we’re legally protected from being forced to reveal our sources’ identities.
If we need to send an email to multiple members of the network at once, we will use BCC (blind carbon copy) so that your contact info is not shared with anyone else, even if you “reply all” to possibly respond to more than one member of our news team at once. But if you have a district-issued email address or device, please use caution before using that account or device to communicate with us.
Here’s the form (click here to open it in a new tab):
If our local journalism matters to you, please help us keep doing this work.
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This post is by the Lawrence Times news team.
If you have news tips, questions, comments, concerns, compliments or corrections for our team, please reach out and let us know what’s on your mind. Email us at Hello@LawrenceKSTimes.com (don’t forget the KS!), or find more contact info and a quick contact form at LawrenceKSTimes.com/contact.
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