Photo by Jud McCrehin
ON WINNING THE
PULITZER PRIZE
T
By Fred Anklam
he light blinked on the phone in front of me on the press row of the Mississippi Senate on the evening of Dec. 20, 1982. “They did it – 96 to 25,” the voice of The Clarion-Ledger reporter Cliff Treyens said matter-of-factly into my ear. I looked up over my right shoulder, catching the eye of Lt. Gov. Brad Dye. He nodded at me, acknowledging that he was getting the same news on his phone: the Mississippi House had passed Gov. William Winter’s landmark education reform act. Immediately the word was whispered among senators on the floor in front of me and created a buzz in the gallery as those who’d been watching the House action began to filter in and spread the news. “Vote, vote,” urged a few senators in an undertone. What had seemed impossible two weeks earlier was about to become reality: a Mississippi law establishing state-fi-
nanced kindergartens, financing special reading aides, requiring compulsory school attendance and raising teacher salaries. More than a year earlier Nancy Weaver (now Teichert) and I had been handed an assignment stunning in its simplicity and powerful in its significance: find out what’s wrong with public education in Mississippi and what needs to be done to fix it. The Clarion-Ledger under Rea Hederman in the mid-1970s had morphed into a tough, probing newspaper whose reporters roamed the state looking for stories that had never been addressed in the newspaper’s earlier years. To Weaver and me, the charge from our editors was not unusual. All reporters on staff were expected to think big. Yet the scope of our challenge was monumental. I had covered education for two years. Weaver was a veteran investigative reporter who had earned national acclaim for her reporting. We found that we made a good team. I introduced her to key players in education and took her to see crumbling public school buildings, private schools that sucked support and resources from public ones, the impact in textbooks
MEEK SCHOOL 13
