Five of the worst schools in Florida are clustered in a 15-square-mile area in Pinellas County’s black neighborhoods. Behavior problems are rampant. Teacher turnover is constant. Michael LaForgia of the Tampa Bay Times investigates how and why these schools are failing kids.
On Tuesday, National Fellow Michael LaForgia and two colleagues received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. In this essay, he shares some of the lessons he learned while reporting the series.
For 30 years, the best school in Florida's Pinellas County was in a black neighborhood. Then the School Board stepped in.
Most large Florida school districts are moving away from suspending children for nonviolent misbehavior — part of a nationwide consensus that harsh discipline falls unfairly on black kids and leaves struggling students too far behind. The Pinellas County School District is an outlier.
