You know, there’s more than one reason us journalism students aren’t math majors... When I heard we would have to do a story based on statistics, with at least one of our math problems used for it written out for our teacher to check, I was not very excited.
Gathering the statistics for this story took every bit of online sleuthing skills that I have built up while stalking new crushes on social media. I found the numbers for the Denton County Point in Time Count pretty quickly. The next challenge was to find numbers to compare them to. Finally, I stumbled upon the homeless student totals from the Texas Homeless Education Office, they were a good comparison, but they only went from 2012-2015. So, next I searched online for another hour or two to find a second source which had data that went from 2016 to 2018. (I have never spent two hours stalking a guy on social media, this story should feel honored.) I was unable to find data for the 2015-2016 school year, so I left out the data from 2016 on both the graphs and the math to have a more accurate representation of the trends. Finally, after all that searching, I compared the data, found that it correlated, and wrote a story about it.
Don’t tell my news stories, but I think now that I’ve had the thrill of finally finding info that I need statistic stories might be my new second favorite story type.
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