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Start the weekend right with SPJ Leads! Latest issue:
Off to Atlanta, Piping up About Pepsi, Back to Beijing
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Week 1 Teams of three to five students are each given the address of a house for sale in the community and told to find out as much about the house and neighborhood as they can from physically acquired public records — no Internet information or people sources. Ideally, assigned houses should be near proposed developments, airport flight paths, or a registered sex offender to better illustrate the value of records. Students are encouraged to think of potentially useful public records on their own, but are provided a list of ideas to get them started: • Property tax records including assessed value, owner’s name, taxes paid and square footage. • Police reports and sex offender registries. • Development plans, including road plans, proposed commercial development and zoning for future development. • Parks plans. • Airport flight pattern maps that show sound levels. • School test scores to compare schools. • EPA records regarding hazardous chemicals and polluted sites. • Nuisance complaints reported to the city. Week 2 Students research access laws, primarily state open records laws. They identify the records they will need and what agencies have them, divvying up the responsibility by agency so every student requests records. Week 3 Students create and submit public records request letters (online generator for each state at www.splc.org). They are instructed to take good notes through the process so they can describe what they did, how the government responded and the outcome. In class they should learn strategies for accessing records. Weeks 4-8 Students work to get the records. A progress report is due at week 6. Week 9 Final reports are due that include a team paper describing the neighborhood and house based on what was found in public records, as well as individual papers from each student explaining the law, what they requested, and how they handled the request. Also, students are asked to describe their attitudes toward open government and personal privacy. Teams present their findings to the class. For a variation of this assignment, teams can access records on campus regarding topics relevant to their lives, such as crime, faculty salaries, class grade distributions, alcohol abuse and department budgets. Students at private universities, where records might be more difficult to acquire, can still do the house-buying exercise.  Impact Students like this assignment because they become fluent in the law, learn strategies for accessing public records and feel confident in applying this knowledge to their jobs and personal lives. Class presentations illustrate the successes and problems of access — a surly clerk who crumples a request and tosses it in the garbage, or a pleasant official who takes the afternoon to help find the information. They learn to be skeptical and are astounded at the amount of information that is available to the public. Also, this assignment increases support for access. Pretest-postest surveys fall 2005 in a media law course found that students who did this project demonstrated greater support for open government than students who did projects on other topics, such as libel or copyright. It is uplifting to see students develop journalistic skills and principles from one assignment. “I’m glad I got to do this because I think it is really helpful for my job and personal life in the future,” wrote one student in evaluations. Another wrote, “The thing I learned most was how much power I have in accessing information!” |
Tools for Educators |
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Copyright © 1996-2008 Society of Professional Journalists. All Rights Reserved. Legal
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David Cuillier, a former newspaper reporter and editor, is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism at the University of Arizona. He researches public attitudes toward freedom of information and is one of the SPJ newsroom trainers for acquiring government documents.
