Cheney High grad receives Polk award

Cheney High School alumna and former Free Press reporter Cara Fitzpatrick has been named a recipient of the prestigious George Polk Awards in Journalism for an education series she helped write as part of a team at the Tampa Bay Times. The Polk Awards are administered by Long Island University in New York, and are named for CBS news correspondent George Polk, who was murdered in 1948 while covering the civil war in Greece.

Seven New York Times journalists were also winners of Polk awards announced on Feb. 14, along with reporters from publications such as the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and Huffington Post.

Fitzpatrick teamed with fellow Tampa Bay Times education reporter Lisa Gartner and Fitzpatrick's husband, Michael LaForgia - who won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 2014 - for a five-part series that traced the decline of black student achievement in five schools in Florida's Pinellas County, where Tampa Bay is located.

"On Dec. 18, 2007, the Pinellas County School Board abandoned integration," the lead to the series titled "Failure Factories" begins. "They justified the vote with bold promises: Schools in poor, black neighborhoods would get more money, more staff, more resources. They delivered none of that. This is the story of how district leaders turned five once-average schools into Failure Factories."

The series was a partnership between the Times education team, investigative team and data team, Fitzpatrick said, involving not only the three reporters but also a couple editors and other staff members. It required 18 – 20 months of work, including one year of information gathering through interviews done by going door-to-door and to events such as Little League games as well as public records collection before the first installment was published.

That first piece was a series of multimedia charts published Aug. 12 that Fitzpatrick said "went viral" online, gathering local and national attention and encouraging the Times editors to believe the countless hours, 12 – 14 hour days, and thousands of dollars would be worth the results. Parts one and two, along with a response from the school board, were also published in August, with a piece "Hear from the Kids," featuring interviews with over 100 families running Sept. 1.

"Many of these were heartbreaking," Fitzpatrick said.

The series wrapped up in December, with part five "Fundamentally Unequal" running Dec. 23 and an epilogue appearing Dec. 29.

"It was a very intense thing for the newspaper," Fitzpatrick said. "It's unusual to see that much (resources) committed to one subject."

It was one of the most involved projects for the 1998 Cheney High School graduate, who earned a double-major - international studies and journalism - from the University of Washington in 2002. Fitzpatrick had never considered a career in journalism, not even writing for the UW student paper, but decided to get some experience in the summer of her junior year when she accepted then-Cheney Free Press editor Dave Rey's offer to work part-time at the paper.

Her first story "Third time's a charm for Rodeo Queen" appeared in the Rodeo Section of the Free Press's July 12, 2001 edition. After graduation, Fitzpatrick interned that summer at the Tri-City Herald, eventually working for the newspaper from 2003 – 2005.

She attended Columbia University's journalism school for a year, receiving a master's of science degree. She eventually drove back across the United States to seek work closer to home in Seattle, but when that didn't pan out, drove to Florida to stay with a friend from Columbia University, who eventually hooked her up with a job opportunity for the Palm Beach Post.

After a couple years at the Post, Fitzpatrick worked briefly at the Sun Sentinel before coming to the Tampa Bay Times in May 2012. She and her husband Michael have two children; a daughter 3-years-old and a son who just turned 2, being born about the time the couple began work on "Failure Factories."

"I said I'd be two years in Florida, it's now 10 years," she said.

Besides the Polk, the Times series has won a National Press Foundation Innovations in Journalism Award, a Philip Myers Award for investigative reporting and is a finalist for the Goldsmith Award. The series has generated action by the Pinellas County School District, which has taken steps to begin rectifying the issues exposed in "Failure Factories" - something that is important to Fitzpatrick.

"The point was these were some of the neediest kids and they weren't getting what they needed," she said. While people and organizations don't like to see their problems splashed across the front page of newspapers, sometimes it takes that type of exposure to elicit needed changes.

"It's why we do those things," Fitzpatrick said.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].