People

By DEVIN RODRIGUEZ and DEVON BONNELL
USFSP Student Reporters

ST. PETERSBURG – The numbers were damning.

At five predominantly black elementary schools in St. Petersburg, standardized test scores were dismal and student suspensions were soaring.

But when the Tampa Bay Times created a team to investigate the story behind the numbers, the timing could not have been worse for schools reporter Cara Fitzpatrick.

She was nine months pregnant.

So it happened that on the day she gave birth, the man she fondly calls “my manic husband” – investigative reporter Michael LaForgia – was at her bedside, asking her, between contractions, to recount the history of segregation in Pinellas County schools.

After three hours, Fitzpatrick gave birth to a baby boy.

The newspaper’s investigation took a bit longer. But after 18 months, the Times began a five-part series on the five schools, which it called “Failure Factories.”

After analyzing mountains of data and conducting hundreds of interviews, the newspaper concluded that the schools, all serving predominantly black neighborhoods, performed satisfactorily until the Pinellas County School Board ended its decades-old desegregation policy in 2007.

The board had promised to provide more money and staff to the schools, which would now serve a poorer and higher minority population. But it failed to follow through.

As a result, the newspaper found, the schools were now plagued by plummeting test scores, chronic violence and crippling staff turnover.

Since the stories were published last year, the U.S. Department of Education has begun an investigation. The school district has hired a turnaround specialist and announced changes in policy, including a longer school day and increased teacher pay at the failing schools. Principals at four of the five schools are being replaced.

Meanwhile, Fitzpatrick, LaForgia and fellow reporter Lisa Gartner won journalism’s highest award – the Pulitzer Prize – for their work.

The team, which also included photojournalist Dirk Shadd, data reporter Nathaniel Lash, computer-assisted reporting specialist Connie Humburg, and investigations editor Chris Davis, was recognized for what the Pulitzer board calls “a distinguished example of reporting on significant issues of local concern, demonstrating originality and community expertise.”

The three reporters and Shadd also won first place reporting and photography awards from the Florida Society of News Editors.

Fitzpatrick, 36, has been an education reporter for a decade.

She grew up in a three-stoplight town in Washington state and got a bachelor’s degree in international studies and journalism from the University of Washington in 2002.

She worked at the Tri-City Herald in Kennewick, Wash., from 2003 to 2005, earned a master’s in journalism from Columbia University in 2006 and then came to Florida.

After stints at the Palm Beach Post and South Florida Sun Sentinel, she joined the Times in 2012.

The “Failure Factories” project started with Fitzpatrick and Gartner, the paper’s education beat reporters.

School system data showed that disciplinary action seemed to fall hardest on black elementary students, Fitzpatrick said, and black students here were performing far worse on state tests that black students in other Florida counties.

Since she had covered school districts elsewhere in Florida where black youngsters did better, she said, she found it strange that local school officials weren’t talking about it.

That prompted a long memo to editors, who eventually decided to create the team to investigate.

Fitzpatrick had intended to take four months’ parental leave. She took two instead.

There were mounds of public records to request and analyze: Standardized test scores from Pinellas and other large school districts in Florida. Statistics showing how often students were disciplined and suspended, compared to other schools in the county. Police reports showing how often officers were summoned to the schools to deal with unruly students. School employee databases and other records showing how many teachers had transferred out of the troubled schools.

In requesting public records from the sometimes balky Pinellas school district, Fitzpatrick said, the newspaper sought to find patterns over several years.

“We needed five to 10 years’ worth of information,” she said. “If you have one year, then you don’t have enough … You can have an off year, but not an off 10 years.”

The Times team reached out to hundreds of people, especially teachers and parents with children in the five schools.

Teachers and administrators who were still employed by the school district were reluctant to talk, Fitzpatrick said, but retired teachers were generally forthcoming about the daunting challenges they had faced.

“These elementary schools had more violent (disciplinary) referrals than 17 of the high schools in the area,” she said. “Teachers had fled from the schools because they were working in hazardous environments.”

The newspaper, she said, “had to be fair with teachers … while asking, ‘Are students truly getting their education?’”

Just as important to the story were interviews with students and their parents, who were, in effect, victims of the school district’s indifference toward the five failing schools. And that’s where Shadd, the Times’ photojournalist, played an important role.

“One of my major take-aways from ‘Failure Factories’ is how important it is to go door to door and speak with people,” said Fitzpatrick. “We interviewed hundreds of people for the story.”

The three reporters are white. Shadd is black. At the paper, he is admired for his affability and people skills, which Fitzpatrick said helped the Times win the confidence of some of the black parents.

“Dirk spent hours with families, showing up at homes before children went to school, riding city buses with some, and hanging out after school,” said Fitzpatrick.

On important stories like this one, said Fitzpatrick, “there is no one who is not worth listening to. You should speak to as many people as you possibly can, especially those outside of the power structure.”

Journalists know that, during a lengthy project, their personal lives will be disrupted.

This project was especially challenging for Fitzpatrick and LaForgia, who had a toddler and newborn at home.

“We spent so much time at the office on weekends that my daughter started to think it was a fun place to go,” said Fitzpatrick. “She asked me on Christmas Day if we were going to the office to see Mr. Chris (Davis, the project’s editor).”

The project may be over now, she said, but her work as a Pinellas schools reporter is ongoing.

“I think that it’s essential for the community to know we didn’t just come in for a great big story and then leave,” she said. “They still see me at meetings and, hopefully, I will write about the (five) schools being better places for kids someday.”

By SAMANTHA PUTTERMAN
USFSP Student Reporter

ST. PETERSBURG – When James Previtera was a senior at St. Petersburg Catholic High School in 1983, his American government teacher gave the students a choice.

They could write a paper, spend a day in court or go on a ride-along with a St. Petersburg police officer.

Previtera chose the ride-along, and it changed his life.

“I guess I never realized there was this whole different world in St. Pete I had never seen,” said Previtera, 50. “And it wasn’t the discovery of that world that motivated me to go into law enforcement. It wasn’t the excitement of it.

“It was just the realization that somebody has got to step up and do this.”

So three years after the ride-along, Previtera became a deputy at the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, the first step in a career that includes 11 years with the Pinellas sheriff, eight with the U.S. Secret Service, and nine with the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office. He has also been a security consultant for Major League Baseball since 2007.

Then in December 2014, Previtera joined the agency that inspired him 31 years earlier. He became an assistant chief at the St. Petersburg Police Department and supervisor of more than 140 detectives and 30 civilians in the agency’s Investigative Services Bureau.

And when he was sworn in, he asked Jim Royle, 78, his old American government teacher, to pin on his badge.

* * *   * * *   * * *

Previtera was only 19 when he became a Pinellas sheriff’s deputy – old enough to patrol the county but too young to buy bullets for his off-duty gun, he said with a laugh. His dad had to buy them.

His first night on patrol, Previtera said, he got a rude welcome to law enforcement: He had to pull his gun on a man who threatened him with a screwdriver.

A year and a half later, he was knocked unconscious while trying to help a deputy make an arrest in Safety Harbor.

In a scuffle, the deputy accidentally struck him in the face with a flashlight. Then the suspect’s brother hit him in the back of the head with a bicycle. He spent several days in the hospital.

As he lay in bed with staples in his aching head, Previtera said, he wondered – briefly – if he should take off the badge and do something else.

He didn’t.

In late 1997, Previtera joined the U.S. Secret Service. In eight years there, he taught hand-to-hand combat to new agents at the agency’s training center in Beltsville, Md., and served in the detail that protected then-Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003-2005.

Previtera was no longer with the Secret Service when Cheney famously peppered a quail hunting companion with birdshot in 2006. But the accident mystifies him.

“I really don’t understand how that happened,” said Previtera. “They are very safety conscious out there because there’s Secret Service agents walking with them.”

Previtera returned to the bay area to join the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in November 2005, first as a major running the Training Division and then as a colonel in command of the county’s 5,300-bed jail facilities.

The jail role, he said, was “probably the best part of my career in terms of development as a leader and as a law enforcement manager.”

It was also an education. To his surprise, he said, he learned that many mentally ill people are criminalized and left untreated by the criminal justice system.

One Hillsborough inmate was so ill he pulled an eyeball out of its socket and handed it to a deputy through the food slide, Previtera said.

At the time, Previtera said, about a quarter of the jail’s daily population took daily psychotropic medication.

To address the issue, he said, he did two things. He started a diversion program to get some inmates out of the detention system and into treatment. And he shook up his management team to bring in a fresh, outside perspective.

“I had to surround myself with the right people,” said Previtera. “I needed a new mentality because I knew that, with the deputies, I couldn’t change theirs if the management above them didn’t mirror my philosophy and my mandates.”

He took charge of the detention facilities six months after video surfaced that showed a deputy at the Orient Road Jail dumping a quadriplegic inmate out of his wheelchair.

Amid a public outcry, the deputy resigned and was charged with one felony count of abuse of a disabled adult. An independent jail review commission established by Sheriff David Gee concluded that eight other deputies violated sheriff’s office procedures.

At a news conference held by the commission, reporters asked Previtera to take questions.

He wasn’t scheduled to speak, he said, and he was unprepared for what followed.

“I went up to the podium, and they proceeded to ambush me – and it was brutal.”

But one television reporter, who was reading the commission report, asked Previtera to explain some of the positive changes he had made in training while commanding the department’s Training Division prior to the incident.

“I remember thinking, “Oh my god, I love this woman.’”

He didn’t see her again until late 2012, nearly five years later.

When he did, he got to know her. Friendship eventually turned into love.

And in the fall of 2015, Previtera and the reporter – Laura Moody, a morning anchor at WTVT Fox 13 – were married.

* * *   * * *   * * *

With the marriage came the sometimes awkward melding of two families. Previtera has four children and Moody, one. It also united a police officer and a journalist – two professions that often clash.

While their careers make for an interesting relationship, the couple said, they manage to keep their professional and personal lives separate.

“She’s very dedicated to her career, and I’m very dedicated to mine,” said Previtera. Sometimes there are stories that are critical of law enforcement and she reports them and I disagree with her. But the good thing about us is that we tend to communicate very well, so even in disagreement we still can communicate effectively.”

Previtera said Moody never asks him about work. If he gets phone call when they’re both in the car, he often calls back later or pulls over and gets out.

“She’ll just look at me and smile because she knows I’m not going to put her in a position where she has to hear something,” he said.

“The fact that he’s a law enforcement officer and I work for the press, that makes for an interesting dynamic and our lives intersect in a lot of ways,” said Moody. “But we keep our professional lives separate. We manage because we love each other and work together.”

A month after he joined the St. Petersburg department, Previtera got a phone call at 2 a.m.

A call at that hour is never good, he said, but he was jolted by what he heard.

“I went outside the room and was talking on the phone,” he said. “I immediately went into the spare bedroom and got my uniform and started getting dressed.”

Moody arises at 3:15 a.m. to prepare for the morning newscast. She sat up in bed as he rushed back in the room.

“I knew that whatever it was, it was bad,” Moody said.

“She asked, ‘Am I going to be talking about this soon?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, you are.’”

Then he left.

It was Jan. 8, 2015, the night police say 5-year-old Phoebe Jonchuck was thrown to her death off the Dick Misener Bridge by her father.

Moody texted Previtera when she got to the station.

“Dear god, tell me this isn’t true.”

* * *   * * *   * * *

Shortly after Anthony Holloway accepted the position as St. Petersburg’s police chief in 2014, he asked Previtera to be an assistant chief and run the department’s Investigative Services Bureau.

“We had dinner together and talked, and I agreed to come over and join him,” said Previtera, who by then was running the Hillsborough sheriff’s Department of Operational Support.  “I had no reason to leave Hillsborough. I enjoyed it. But it was a chance to come back to my hometown and be part of something exciting.”

As head of the Investigative Services Bureau, Previtera oversees all of the department’s detectives and investigative functions, including vice and narcotics.

On a typical day, he said, he will be discussing a narcotics investigation and switch to an attempted homicide within 20 minutes.

“I’m kind of all over the place,” he said with a laugh.

Previtera said he tries to leave the office as much as he can. Under Holloway’s “park, walk and talk” policy, all 550 of the department’s sworn officers must get out of their cars and interact with the community for at least an hour a week.

“When I used to supervise deputies on the street, I called it ‘get out and play football’ because I would get out and play football with the kids, talk to them and get to know their parents,” Previtera said. “In my opinion, that’s the only way we, as a profession, are going to be able to re-establish ourselves to a level of respect in all communities.”

But he said he’s had tough days, too.

“There are days when this is a pretty intense seat to sit in,” said Previtera. “There are days I feel like there’s somebody on the other end of my office with a pitching machine just unleashing fast balls at me all day long.”

Although December will mark 30 years since Previtera began police work, his old American government teacher still checks up on him.

“We might talk a couple times a month; I know his job is so intense so I try not to bother him,” Royle said. “But I worry about him, especially in his field. You don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Royle saw a slew of students come and go over the years. Many went on to successful careers and stayed in touch.

But just a few really stand out, said Royle.

“Jimmy was always special.”

By JEFFREY ZANKER
USFSP Student Reporter

ST. PETERSBURG — Students who earn degrees in education at USF St. Petersburg don’t have to worry much about finding a teaching job after graduation.

But teaching these days is no school picnic.

That’s the assessment of Bill Heller, who as dean of the College of Education and a former state legislator has an insider’s perspective on the intersection of education and politics.

“If you want employment, you can have it in education,” said Heller, who predicted that most of the college’s 300 undergrads will land jobs. “But it’s a tough world in education right now.”

Virtually every lawmaker had “one bad teacher” growing up, Heller said, so many legislators believe they know what’s best in setting standards for curriculum, students and teachers.

As a result, teachers have lost professional development opportunities and job protection, he said. They are increasingly judged by their students’ standardized test scores, and the state’s “best and brightest” teacher scholarships are based in part on how teachers performed on their SAT or ACT tests.

“I’m not a fan of the best and brightest” program, said Heller, who said education “has become a political football.”

Heller traces his passion for education to his own upbringing in a series of rural, one-room schools in Illinois. Teachers “always made special efforts with my brother and me,” who were raised by their father – a poor farmer with a sixth-grade education – and grandparents, he said.

“Teaching is a part of me.”

He married his wife, Jeanne, in 1954. Her sister is deaf, he said, and that helped prompt his career-long interest in special education.

After a hitch as a paratrooper with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, Heller earned a bachelor’s in elementary and special education at Southern Illinois University, a master’s in guidance and counseling from Northern Illinois and a doctorate in special education from Northern Colorado University.

In the years that followed, his career included stints as a special education teacher, an administrator in the U.S. Department of Education, superintendent of a psychiatric hospital and professor and administrator at Indian State University, the University of Alabama and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Heller served as dean of education for UNC Charlotte from 1979 to 1992, the year he became dean and executive officer of the St. Petersburg campus of USF.

Back then, the campus had 3,200 students, all juniors, seniors and graduate students –less than half of the student body today.

Under Heller’s leadership, the campus flourished and grew over the next decade, becoming an increasingly important player in the St. Petersburg community. And as it grew, Heller said, he pushed to make the campus a four-year institution with residence halls and its own accreditation.

“Who wouldn’t want to have four-year college program on a beautiful site like this?” he said.

In 2002, he abruptly resigned his post at the request of USF President Judy Genshaft – a move that rankled many people on campus and in the community – and returned to teaching.

Heller said he and Genshaft disagreed on the goals and direction for the campus, and since he “served at the mercy, the pleasure,” of the president, he stepped down as requested.

“She had a responsibility” as president, he said, and he respected that. He said Genshaft has been a good president and he counts her as a friend.

He also noted that his goals for the campus – including separate accreditation in 2006 – have been realized.

“Sometimes the messenger loses his arm,” he said.

At the encouragement of a former USF president, Betty Castor, Heller ran for a seat in the state House of Representatives in 2006. He served two two-year terms as a Democrat before being swept out of office in 2010 at the height of the tea party movement, “when everybody was to the right of Attila the Hun.”

That same year Heller became director of the Bishop Center for Ethical Leadership and Civic Engagement on campus, and in 2012 he became dean of the College of Education.

Heller, 80, and his wife have made donations to numerous campus programs. They have three children, three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Retirement is not in his immediate plans, Heller said.

“My wife doesn’t want me at home full time,” he quipped, and “I haven’t had a day yet that I didn’t want to come to work.”

By MARLA KORENICH
USFSP Student Reporter

ST. PETERSBURG – You could say that the entrepreneur in Lauren Davenport began to emerge in middle school.

For 25 cents an item, she would iron clothes for her mother and some of the people in her neighborhood, all for the love of shoes.

“I definitely had the most shoes out of everyone in school,” she said. “It was fantastic.”

Davenport, 27, still likes shoes – more than 50 pairs, at last count. And as founder and CEO of a rapidly expanding digital marketing company in St. Petersburg, she can afford them.

Her Symphoni Media has more than 25 employees and a wide client base that includes companies like Marriott, American Strategic Insurance and Bryant Heating and Cooling Systems.

The St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce named Davenport a finalist for its Entrepreneur Iconic Woman of the Year award in 2014. The next year, the Business Observer, a weekly magazine for business leaders from Tampa Bay to Naples, named her one of its “40 under 40” bright, young entrepreneurs to watch. She was the youngest person on the list.

Davenport said she chose the name Symphoni Media with help from her father because she likes to compare her agency to an orchestra, where everyone works together “to create something beautiful.”

Davenport got her start began in public relations in Nashville, her hometown.

While studying journalism at Middle Tennessee State University in nearby Murfreesboro, she began handling social media for the bar where she worked. Soon she was editing code and HTML for 15 businesses.

“I knew I would always be ‘the college kid’ if I stayed there,” Davenport said. “So to continue my business I had to move.”

She looked for a city with at least 200,000 people and more small businesses than corporations. St. Petersburg fit the bill, she said, and “it has a beach.”

Three days after arriving in 2011, Davenport took her dog out after a night with friends and tripped over another dog named Chance. It was a propitious encounter.

“I knew right then I wanted to marry her,” said Chance’s owner, Daniel Fernandez.

Their first date was skydiving.

“I had to set the bar as high as possible, and I did at 14,000 feet,” Fernandez said.

Davenport started Symphoni Media with four interns in an office on Central Avenue in downtown St. Petersburg.

Her staff – now 25 and growing – includes her husband as chief marketing officer and her father, Chris Davenport, as president and chief operating officer.

Her father, who flies back and forth from Nashville, handles human resources and legal issues and helps oversee operations. He is also a global security consultant for IBM.

Before marrying Davenport and joining her company, Fernandez was director of marketing at Florida Hospital Orlando.

He studied Davenport’s goals and realized they were passionate about the same things.

“I saw her vision and thought we could carve an etch for our own gig,” Fernandez said.

In a small-business setting, being married to the boss can be tricky for the couple and uncomfortable for employees.

“They are a power couple, and they work well together,” said Tyler Killette, who was a content creator there for seven months in 2014 and 2015. “It isn’t awkward.”

With a growing staff came the need for a bigger office. Symphoni Media now works in temporary quarters in an office park off Roosevelt Boulevard that is next door to the 7,000-square-foot office that will become home this summer.

According to Fernandez, the new office will have a common area, projectors, Mario Kart video games, computers, and a quiet room.

It will also be dog friendly. Davenport’s dog Bella is around almost every day.

By SHAWN AVERY SPEAGLE
USFSP Student Reporter

ST. PETERSBURG – Yolanda Fernandez’s worst day on the job began one night at 1 a.m.

A man had dropped his 5-year-old daughter off a bridge to her death, St. Peterburg police said, and they needed her to handle what would become an avalanche of news media inquiries.

When the call came, Fernandez said, she jumped out of bed, dressed and rushed to the police station.

As the department’s spokeswoman, she had to verify the facts so she knew what to share with reporters without jeopardizing the investigation. She had to field inquiries about the death of little Phoebe Jonchuck from as far away as New York and Los Angeles.

“I was working for a day and a half straight before I was able to go home and sleep,” said Fernandez, 53. “I had a new appreciation for officers that work crazy hours.”

She had been on the job for only eight months.

Fernandez already knew a lot about deadlines and the news media, since she had been a television reporter and news anchor for 30 years, the last 25 at WFLA-News Channel 8.

That’s one of the reasons St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman hired her in May 2014 to be spokeswoman and community awareness manager for the Police Department.

“During my years as a news anchor, I had dealt with police agencies,” Fernandez said. “I know the ins and outs of both the media and the police.”

But many St. Petersburg officers – who generally view reporters with skepticism – were dubious.

“Officers were wary of her at first, including myself,” said Rick Shaw, a 33-year veteran who now works alongside Fernandez as a civilian in the public information office.

But he grew to respect her, he said, as he watched her handle the crush of responsibilities after the little girl was dropped off the Dick Misener Bridge at 12:10 a.m. on Jan. 8, 2015.

Since then, he said, he has seen her deal with the media, prep officers on how to respond to reporters, and use social media to spread positives about the department “that have never gotten out before.”

Police Chief Anthony Holloway, who was hired shortly after Fernandez’s arrival, said she has helped improve the department’s image and the sometimes uneasy relationship between police and the media.

“She has continuously helped me understand the media and its importance,” he said, “and the officers here owe her quite a bit of gratitude.”

Fernandez said she left News Channel 8 so she could take charge of her next step in life.

Anchor Gayle Sierens was the only woman older than she in the newsroom, and Fernandez – a former Miss Alabama and third runner-up in the 1982 Miss America pageant – assumed she might eventually be replaced by someone younger.

“Women have more pressure in the work force, especially when dealing with television,” she said. “Physical appearance is stressed more for women than men.”

So when Kriseman offered her the police job – which now pays $96,000 a year – she welcomed the change.

In recent years, the department’s public information office had been staffed by men who were retired police officers, so Fernandez became a trailblazer with a different perspective on things.

Fernandez said she coaches officers on dealing with the media and tries to help reporters get the information they need without too much difficulty on either side.

“It is better to have someone else deal with the media,” she said. “Let the officers focus on their jobs while I handle how they are portrayed in the media.”

Fernandez also has revamped the department’s social media accounts.

Before she arrived, she said, the department’s Facebook account had less than a thousand friends. Now it has about 20,000. The department’s Twitter account has over 7,000 followers, and Fernandez hopes to have about 10,000 by the end of the year.

Through social media, Fernandez puts out information that won’t make the 6 o’clock news, especially positive moments about police that people usually don’t see.

She said she is especially proud of her campaign on public safety, which featured a video about one of the department’s bomb squad dogs. The video was so popular online that news stations throughout Florida used it.

Fernandez said she always has “raw (video) footage” of events available for news media pickup. “My office has to understand what the media needs and how the media can help the department,” she said.

She said she sees major opportunities online for people who want to send tips and information to police without being seen.

Social media also helps the department keep up to date and relevant with younger people, she said.

“We have to be in touch with young people and show them that officers shouldn’t be associated with just bad news,” Fernandez said.  “They are human, too, and do a lot of good in the community.”

Fernandez grew up in north Pinellas and graduated from Troy State University in Alabama. She has been married for 30 years to John Walker, an assistant to the deans at Clearwater Central Catholic High School.

Their 20-year-old son goes to the University of Florida, and their 18-year-old daughter goes to Clearwater Central Catholic and plans to start at UF in the fall.