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School ticketing investigation ‘The Price Kids Pay’ wins journalism award

Chicago Tribune
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Blake, 17, and his mother Jennifer Fee, left, talk to prosecutor Pat McGrath at the Tazewell County Courthouse in March 2022. Blake received a ticket for having a tobacco vaping device at school.

Blake, 17, and his mother Jennifer Fee, left, talk to prosecutor Pat McGrath at the Tazewell County Courthouse in March 2022. Blake received a ticket for having a tobacco vaping device at school. (Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)

The Chicago Tribune and ProPublica have won a 2022 IRE Award for exposing how Illinois school officials were working with local police to punish students with costly tickets.

“The Price Kids Pay” documented how thousands of Illinois students a year were receiving tickets at school for conduct that violated local laws. The tickets often involved behavior as minor as littering, vaping or getting into a hallway scuffle.

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The nonprofit organization Investigative Reporters and Editors gave the work the top prize in the large print/online division, honoring Tribune reporter Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica reporter Jodi S. Cohen and Tribune photographer Armando L. Sanchez.

Ticketing students violates the intent of an Illinois law that prohibits schools from fining students as a form of discipline. Instead of issuing fines directly, school officials refer students to police, who write the tickets. The fines attached can be hundreds of dollars, an impossible burden for many families. The reporters also found Black students were ticketed at higher rates than their white peers.

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“ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune documented these findings by creating a unique database built on hundreds of records requests and painstaking analysis, as well as shoe leather reporting and creative storytelling techniques,” the IRE judges wrote.

Hours after the first story in the series was published, the state’s top education official sent a strongly worded letter to school administrators, urging them to stop working with police to ticket students. Carmen Ayala, then superintendent of the Illinois State Board of Education, wrote that fines associated with the tickets hurt families and there’s no evidence they change students’ behavior.

In February, legislators introduced a bill in the Illinois House that aims to make the practice illegal. The Tribune and ProPublica found that many districts have continued to work with police to ticket students, despite Ayala’s plea. “We have to close that loophole and end school-based ticketing,” Rep. La Shawn Ford told reporters. “There is no place for this type of system to be in our schools.”

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