When I was envisioning this site, I knew I wanted to continue reporting on education and grow my reporting on health and climate.

Louisiana is an exciting place to do this — a flyover country secret I’ve always known. We are the nation’s weathervane. Other parts of the nation are quick to write off the south — but it is the testing ground for policy and law that often spreads. We are on the front lines of climate change and education reform.

Building on 15 years of award-winning and ground-breaking education reporting, this is my new home for chronicling micro and ultimately macro issues.

Right now, you can find me working at a lovely little stationery shop, babysitting and freelancing to pull it together financially. Health care ain’t cheap.

This will allow me to write here at Lamplighter.

I want to tell you how I chose the name.

While envisioning this site, my engineer father and artist mother were visiting New Orleans and we got to talking.

When my dad was finishing his degree in mechanical engineering in the early 80s, he used to drop off his hand-scrawled papers in my grandmother’s mailbox on Lamplighter Lane. She would type them up while he worked the graveyard shift so he could turn them in the next day.

Even though I’ve heard the Lamplighter Lane house referenced thousands of times in family stories, it struck me differently this time.

It represents an honest and hard-working vocation.

lamp·light·er /ˈlampˌlīdər/ noun: a person employed to light street gaslights by hand

A bit messy, solitary at times and perhaps unnoticed — until the entire street is illuminated. The process to get there is an element I love: incremental.

My work has always been built on incremental reporting. I started as a cub reporter fighting my way into charter school board meetings that were deemed too small for the legacy media to cover. Fast-forward to tracing 17 students’ grades that were allegedly altered to an entire graduation scandal that brought down a charter network and sparked district-wide reform. This is some of my proudest work.

When our community can look back to this bedrock of incremental reporting we can see where we’ve grown and where we are still struggling to make progress.

Without that record we are untethered.

Back to my grandmother’s dining room table and typewriter. I can see family threads continue presenting themselves in novel ways — I can imagine those keystrokes leading to my own.

You can find me here at Lamplighter. Public service journalism one post at a time.