Journalism Lesson Plan

Overview:Open government is the very heart of democracy. Citizens have the right to know what their elected and appointed officials are doing and access the records that will tell them. Citizens who don’t have the time or expertise to dig for information then rely on journalists to find out for them. That’s the theme of the annual Sunshine Week. In 2007, a wide range of resources are available to use for story ideas, projects and lesson plans. Let the sun shine in!

Suggested time allotment: Three days to read about open records and how to access them. An undetermined length of time to access health inspection records. Then a week to conduct interviews and a week to write the in-depth article.

Objectives

Students will:

1. Read background material about accessing open records, including how to file a Freedom of Information request. (A state-by-state letter generator is available on the Student Press Law Center Web site. See link below.)
2. Decide what restaurants they want to investigate. It could be simply those close to school where students eat lunch or it could be all chain restaurants compared to locally owned ones. Or it could be any combination.
3. Contact the county health inspection office to access the records for those restaurants.
4. Interview a county health official to put the reports in perspective. (Note the way the reporter did this in the SPLC article below. Find out what the infractions mean, what is considered acceptable and what isn’t, what it takes to close a restaurant, etc.)
5. Interview restaurant owners and managers. They may not want to talk to reporters, but the article could not the attempt to get their side.
6. Interview students and faculty who eat at these restaurants.
7. Write an in-depth article about health violations in the school’s vicinity. How common are they? How dangerous? (DON’T be sensational about this!) What would it take to correct the problems?
8. If the editorial board agrees, write an editorial asking these establishments to “clean up their acts” for the student eaters!

Standards: National Council of Teachers of English and International Reading Association Standards for English Language Arts:

4. Students adjust their use of spoken, written and visual language (e.g., conventions, style, vocabulary) to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences and for different purposes.
5. Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.

7. Students conduct research on issues and interests by generating ideas and questions and by posing problems. They gather, evaluate and synthesize data from a variety of sources (e.g., print and nonprint texts, artifacts, people) to communicate their discoveries in ways that suit their purpose and audience.
8. Students use a variety of technological and informational resources (e.g., libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge.
12. Students use spoken, written and visual language to accomplish their own purposes (e.g., for learning, enjoyment, persuasion and the exchange of information).

Resources and materials:
Web sites with information:
• “USING OPEN RECORDS: Local restaurant health inspections provide story ideas, service to readers,” by Brian Hudson, SPLC staff writer, March 12, 2007, on the SPLC Web site. Hudson explains the process and gives an example of what he found near his office.
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• Is it difficult to access this sort of information? First get more background about what is available. Links to everything from the “FOI Law Primer to and FOI Letter Generator are posted at
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• For last year’s event, the SPLC posted the following: “Sunshine Week: High school journalists dig through public records to get the real dirt,” March 13, 2006. This article tells about stories student journalists uncovered because they were willing to dig.
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• What other topics are possible? Check out the Sunshine Week Web site and, in particular, “Bright Ideas.” One downloadable pdf shows what teens and college students have already accomplished.
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