This letter outlines potential approaches for collaboration with an institutional funder to support expanded reporting on the growing influence of extremist actors in public education. This sample has been anonymized and minimally redacted to protect funder, organizational, and individual confidentiality.

Letter of Intent

Covering Extremism in Public Education
Redacted institutional funder
September 2024

Across the country, efforts to restrict curricula, limit access to information, and erode trust in public schools have increasingly targeted communities with fewer local resources or less organized opposition. In this context, coordinated strategies that test extreme ideas locally and then scale them across regions have proven effective in undermining equitable education and public trust.

A statewide nonprofit newsroom seeks to expand coverage of these dynamics, particularly outside major metropolitan areas, where reporting capacity is often limited and the impact on communities is underreported.

Proposed Coverage Approaches

Scenario 1: Incremental support for expanded coverage

Who: Existing newsroom staff
What: Integrating focused reporting on extremism into ongoing education coverage
Where: Statewide, including rural and non-metro regions
When: One year
Why: A small number of organized actors are exerting outsized influence on education policy and curriculum decisions in under-resourced communities.
How: Additional funding would support staff time, travel, editing, and visual reporting to produce a series of in-depth stories over the course of the year.

This approach would allow the newsroom to build coverage capacity while continuing to meet daily reporting demands. Stories would be distributed directly to affected communities through established regional and partner networks.

Scenario 2: Dedicated reporter and sustained coverage

Who: A newly hired, dedicated reporter
What: Enterprise and accountability reporting focused on extremist activity in public education, with the potential development of a dedicated newsletter
Where: Statewide
When: Multi-year initiative
Why: Sustained, specialized reporting is necessary to track evolving strategies, actors, and impacts over time.
How: Funding would support a full-time reporter, travel, photography, editing, and community engagement.

This model prioritizes depth, continuity, and long-term public understanding, while ensuring reporting reaches communities most affected by these issues through trusted local outlets.