2024-2025

Dani McClain

May 24, 2024 by

Dani McClain reports on race, parenting and reproductive health and is a contributing writer at The Nation. She has written about play therapy and Black families’ experiences of the pandemic for The New York Times, the complicated legacy of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger for Harper’s BAZAAR, and how to talk to kids about racism and policing for The Atlantic. Her work has been recognized by the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, the National Association of Black Journalists and Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She received a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism and served as a Type Media Center fellow. Earlier in her career, Dani reported on schools while on staff at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and taught social studies at Clark Montessori High School in Cincinnati. Her book We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood was published in 2019 by Bold Type Books and was shortlisted in 2020 for a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She was the Cincinnati public library’s Writer-in-Residence in 2020 and 2021.

As a Spencer Fellow, Dani will explore the crisis in youth mental health with a focus on school-based interventions to support Black children’s wellbeing.

Fabiola Cineas

May 24, 2024 by

Fabiola Cineas is a reporter at Vox where she has covered race, policy, and culture since 2020.

Her work includes an examination of the fights surrounding critical race theory, social emotional learning, affirmative action, teaching history, and AP African American studies. Fabiola has also looked at the coronavirus’s early impact on Black communities and policies such as baby bonds and federal universal pre-K. As a host of the Emmy-nominated YouTube originals series Glad You Asked, she explored meritocracy, mental health, housing, and implicit bias in various episodes. As a host for Vox’s Missing Chapter video series, she helped produce a mini documentary about Māori people’s fight for reparations in New Zealand that won an Online Journalism Award for longform digital video storytelling.

Before joining Vox, Cineas was an editor and writer at Philadelphia magazine, where she led the publication’s coverage of the city’s innovation scene. She kicked off her career in journalism as an education reporter for the Philadelphia Public School Notebook and Chalkbeat New York. Before launching her career in journalism, she taught seventh-graders in Camden, New Jersey through Teach for America.

As a Spencer Fellow, Fabiola will take a close look at how the conservative push to remake public education is changing school environments and potentially violating student civil rights.

Sequoia Carrillo

May 24, 2024 by

Sequoia Carrillo is currently an education reporter for NPR. She covers K-12 policy and regularly reports on issues like school segregation and infrastructure challenges for the network. Recently, she led a series of stories on the impacts of fentanyl in schools. She’s also spent the past few years learning the ins and outs of the student loan system and hearing borrowers’ stories. Her reporting on joint consolidation loans, a type of student loan that chained couples together even in cases of divorce and abuse, helped propel a fix into law.

She regularly reports on Indigenous communities and identity – from her own family’s story to the legacies of federal Indian boarding schools to questions of tribal land ownership. Her reporting has appeared on numerous NPR podcasts including Code Switch, Throughline and Life Kit.

As a Spencer Fellow, Sequoia will look at the conflating factors that cause American Indian students to make up a disproportionately small percentage of higher education institutions.