2019-2020

Samantha Hernandez has covered education and courts for the Green Bay Press-Gazette in Green Bay, Wisconsin since 2017. Prior to that, she covered rural education issues in Door County, Wisconsin, as the Door County Advocate’s education and general assignment reporter starting in 2010. Four of the county’s five school districts are rural, including Wisconsin’s smallest K-12 school located on an island. Hernandez continued covering rural issues at the Press-Gazette in the areas of school funding (link is external) and mental health (link is external) and reported on a program to help Spanish speakers obtain GEDs (link is external). Hernandez is an active participant in the Education Writers Association where she has contributed her expertise on covering rural school districts as a national conference speaker and has served on its Diversity and Inclusion Task Force.

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Hernandez plans to spend her Spencer Fellowship year reporting on how states are addressing school funding gaps in rural areas and how those districts are working to make up for funding shortfalls.

Casey Parks is a staff reporter for The Hechinger Report, where her coverage of Louisiana (link is external) last year prompted the state to repeal a long-standing rule that barred immigrant students from playing high school sports. She previously worked at the Jackson (Miss.) Free Press and spent a decade at The Oregonian, where she wrote about race and LGBTQ issues. There, she followed a transgender teenager for three years (link is external) as he transitioned and navigated high school amid changing cultural norms and she was a Livingston Finalist for a profile of two Tongan teenagers (link is external) choosing between their faith and football. Last year, her story about a Louisiana woman trying to graduate  (link is external)from the historically black college Grambling State University ran on The New Yorker’s website.

Parks, a Louisiana native who attended Millsaps College in Mississippi, plans to use the Spencer Fellowship to report about rural education issues through the story of one school district in the Mississippi Delta.

Benjamin Herold is a technology reporter at Education Week, where he has profiled teen hackers (link is external), led an award-winning investigation into the nation’s online charter schools (link is external) and detailed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s multi-billion dollar foray into publication education (link is external). Prior to joining Education Week in 2013, Herold covered the Philadelphia school district for WHYY public radio and the Philadelphia Public School Notebook, winning first-place awards from the Education Writers Association as the nation’s top education beat reporter (2012) and for his feature reporting on Philadelphia’s mass school closings (link is external) (2013). Before becoming a journalist, Herold worked as a policy researcher, an independent documentary filmmaker and a training specialist for rape-crisis and domestic-violence-prevention organizations.

Benjamin has a master’s degree in urban education from Temple University in Philadelphia, where he currently lives with his family. With a Spencer Fellowship, Herold plans to take an in-depth look at the changing face of opportunity in America’s suburban public schools, chronicling how school districts and families alike are responding to sweeping demographic and economic shifts and exploring what such choices mean for the long-term future of traditional public education.

Beenish Ahmed is a writer and reporter who most recently covered education and transportation for WNYC in New York City. In the last year, Beenish has reported on race and the city’s specialized high schools, including stories on who who finds out about test prep (link is external) and the lasting impact of being one of the only black students admitted (link is external).

Her previous work has aired or appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, The Atlantic, NPR and other outlets. Beenish reported from Haiti on how Vodou how Vodou offers sanctuary for queer people (link is external); from Kenya on why tribal elders have been why tribal elders are being brutally attacked by family members (link is external) and from Malawi on a grassroots effort to stop a sexual rite-of-passage for young girls (link is external). A Pakistani-American, she also spent two years reporting in Pakistan, covering topics including a smartphone-based scheme to combat a dengue fever epidemic (link is external) and a beauty salon that employs acid burn survivors (link is external).

Beenish founded THE ALIGNIST, (link is external) a venture that connects international novels to international news. She was a Kroc Fellow at NPR and a Fulbright Scholar (link is external) to the United Kingdom. Her dissertation charted how the experiences of Indian students at elite universities and law schools made them forego promising careers in the British Raj to instead call for an end to colonial rule. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Beenish plans to use her Spencer Fellowship to report on NYC school inequality, connecting school desegregation policies to affirmative action in higher education.