The Lost Year: Stories of School During a Pandemic

Behind The Series

Lede New Orleans works with emerging BIPOC and LGBTQ+ storytellers in our city to tell the stories of communities that go overlooked by local media, ensuring that our city’s narrative reflects the lived experiences of the people who live here. We believe storytelling and journalism should support communities and help them thrive, not undermine them.

For this project, Lede New Orleans trained and paid nine community reporting fellows to learn multimedia storytelling skills over a 14-week fellowship and document the stories of local K-12 students and educators returning to in-person classes amid the COVID-19 pandemic. These fellows will continue use their skills to tell stories about their neighbors and help their communities access information.

To pick stories for this series, Lede New Orleans surveyed local students, parents and teachers about their back-to-school experiences and supported fellows in doing outreach among within their own community networks.

Lede New Orleans is transforming how local stories are told by broadening who gets to do this work. Join us in ensuring all New Orleanians can take part in the local narrative by supporting our work today.

The Stories

Our community reporting fellows spent several weeks during spring 2021 interviewing students, educators and families for a series of written profiles, as well as video profiles highlighting the experiences of the community members they interviewed.

The Lost Year series was published on Medium (click here to read) and on YouTube (click here to watch), and distributed to the community over social media.