Worth Bingham Prize goes to Tribune, ProPublica for school ticketing investigation ‘The Price Kids Pay’

A collaboration between the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica about police and schools punishing students with costly tickets has won the 2022 Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism.

The investigation by the Tribune’s Jennifer Smith Richards and ProPublica’s Jodi S. Cohen was the broadest look ever at student ticketing; the reporters documented how local police had ticketed Illinois students thousands of times over a three-year period.

Titled “The Price Kids Pay,” the series showed how the ticketing process defied the intention of a state law that prohibits schools from fining children as a form of discipline. Instead of levying fines, school officials referred misbehaving students to police, who wrote the tickets for violations of local laws. Often the infraction was as minor as littering or possessing a vaping device.

[ Read the full investigation — The Price Kids Pay: Ticketed at school ]

The fines were difficult to fight and often burdened families with payments they could ill afford. Black students were more likely than their white peers to be ticketed. And the reporters discovered that dozens of school districts had referred students to police to be ticketed for truancy, a practice explicitly prohibited by state law.

The reporting was based on hundreds of public records requests, and the team traveled across the state to attend ticketing hearings and talk to families.

“Not only was the reporting dogged and thorough even in the face of great difficulty, it also tied together threads of widespread societal issues,” Bingham Prize judge Benny Becker wrote. “The story had a clear and powerful impact in changing policy and improving lives of those needlessly suffering, which allowed the story to point toward solutions rather than just piling onto the readers’ sense of despair.”

[ Read our latest investigation, Stalled Justice, on the dysfunctional Cook County criminal courts ]

Among the many actions prompted by the investigation: The state superintendent immediately urged schools to cease working with police to ticket students, and many districts changed their policies. Not all school officials have stopped the practice, however, and this year legislators introduced a bill that would make it illegal.

Another Bingham Prize judge, Julia Lurie, wrote: “To me, this is accountability reporting at its finest: It shows the immense harm caused by a common, predatory, previously unexamined practice, and it provoked an immediate response.”

The team behind the project included Tribune photojournalist Armando Sanchez, ProPublica illustrator Laila Milevski and ProPublica news apps developer Ruth Talbot, who built a search tool so members of the public could explore ticketing practices at different school districts. It was edited by the Tribune’s Kaarin Tisue and ProPublica’s Steve Mills and George Papajohn.

The Worth Bingham Prize, presented annually by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, honors “investigative reporting of stories of national significance where the public interest is being ill-served.”

“The Price Kids Pay” previously received the 2022 IRE Award in the large print/online division from the nonprofit organization Investigative Reporters and Editors.