AP education reporter Bianca Vázquez Toness describes how an in-depth eviction project turned into a timely housing affordability story.

By Alexander Russo

The Associated Press education team sets annual themes and doesn’t do school culture wars stories, by and large — and that’s a good thing, at least according to me (and the Pulitzer Committee).

But sometimes the resulting stories still have both extraordinary depth and immediate timeliness.

That’s the case in a recent piece about one Atlanta parent’s struggles to keep her son enrolled in the same high school — despite a past eviction record and a stubborn lack of affordable housing in the area.

“We know that it’s bad because we hear about it from teachers and principals,” says AP education reporter Bianca Vázquez Toness about the team’s decision to focus on housing challenges that plague many families. “But people haven’t written about it through the eyes of kids and parents specifically.”

In this new interview, Toness reveals how she found and reported the story, the “resource deserts” that differentiate neighboring districts (and make parents so desperate to keep their kids in some districts), and what makes the AP education team different:

“We’ve been given permission to see education as not just things that happen in schools.”

Avoiding a narrow focus on schools isn’t easy for an education reporter to do, however — even when it’s encouraged. After we’d finished recording, Toness told me how, in reporting a previous story, she’d had to learn not to always ask a Los Angeles mother experiencing housing instability whether the son was going to school.

Watch the conversation above on Substack or via YouTube.

Read the unedited AI-generated transcript.

Listen to it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Read the story & background information:

She wanted to keep her son in his school district. It was more challenging than it seemed

Takeaways from AP’s story on the links between eviction and school

Photo Essay: One single mom’s quest to find housing after an eviction

Getting the story: How an AP reporter chronicled a sensitive story about school and eviction

Other resources:

Evicted in CT: How one ninth-grader navigated new obstacles (CT Mirror)

Reading, Writing, Evicted (Oregonian)

Previously from The Grade

An interview with the AP team responsible for Pulitzer-recognized education coverage

Single-family housing and education

Student-re-engagement: the missing half of attendance and absenteeism coverage