Joining in the excitement of another year of school coverage

Assistant Sports Editor Kevin Schmit opened his High Five column on Tuesday with a distinctly suburban truth: “There’s no avoiding the excitement of prep football season,” he wrote.

As summer rushes into the middle of August, that electricity is beginning to crackle in households across the region. But it’s not football alone that brings a special energy this time of year. Nor is this spirit limited to the wider range of prep sports — including soccer, golf, cross country and more — that signal a new round of high school athletic competitions. It truly expands to encompass the entire range of activities that define the school experience.

So for us at the Daily Herald, it’s also true that there’s no avoiding the commitment to bring as much of it as we can into your homes, laptops and smart phones.

Reporting on what’s happening in our schools is important everywhere, but it has a particular resonance in the suburbs, where high-quality education has been integral to so many parents’ decision to locate their families here. Our editors, reporters and photographers are acutely aware of this special level of interest. They know that meaningful education coverage requires paying attention not just to what school boards do in setting policies and levying taxes — as important as those things are — but also and especially to what happens in classrooms, auditoriums and sports arenas.

If you’ve been unable to avoid the selective excitement Schmit referred to Monday, you’ve been noticing our preps coverage and previews ramping up in recent weeks. In addition to Schmit’s High Five column, you noticed correspondent Dick Quagliano’s scouting report Tuesday on football teams in the Mid-Suburban League West conference, as well as his report a day earlier on MSL East teams. Last Friday, you saw predictions by Schmit regarding the upcoming preps football season, in addition to a profile of Lake Zurich High School standout defensive end Jackson Lewandowski we published from the Chicago Tribune. On Wednesday, you saw sports senior writer Mike McGraw’s column on a rejuvenating Lisle High School football program and correspondent Bobby Narang’s previews of the coming seasons in boy’s and girl’s golf.

And for the broader education picture this week, you saw on Tuesday Assistant City Editor Madhu Krishnamurthy’s comprehensive look at a growing concern among some parents about the influence of technology resources in their students’ learning. Also Tuesday, senior writer Eric Peterson captured some of the excitement of school starts under way throughout the suburbs, and in a front-page centerpiece on Monday, Peterson described efforts to emphasize e-bike safety as students head back to school.

All of this is, as we say, only the beginning. Of course, we know that throughout the school year you will need to know what the school board is doing with your tax dollars and how trustees are setting policies governing programs and operations. But we also know that you need to see these policies and activities in action. To that end, there is among us at the Daily Herald no avoiding the excitement and the responsibility of showing them to you.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His book “To Nudge The World: Conversations, community and the role of the local newspaper” is a 2025 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year and is available at eckhartzpress.com.