First Big Scoop: Student Journalists Expose High School’s Use of Prison Labor

Last January, at his high school’s chorus fundraiser, 17-year-old Spencer Cliche overheard a chat between a parent and a “trusted faculty member.” (As a student journalist, he told me, he does not reveal his sources.) The seats in the auditorium, Spencer says he heard the two adults saying, were going to be reupholstered using prison labor.

He didn’t think much of it at first. But later in the semester when his journalism class studied prison issues, he mentioned what he’d heard to the teacher, Sara Barber-Just, a two-decade veteran of Amherst Regional High in Massachusetts. Couldn’t the fact that the school was using incarcerated laborers—who may learn useful skills but are typically paid next to nothing—be a story for the next edition of the school’s quarterly newspaper, he