In late of January of 2024, a member of Echo Staff was made aware of allegations involving peer-on-peer sexual harassment and/or assault within the Hixson Middle School. Due to the importance of the issue, the Echo decided to move forward and take necessary precautions to ensure the privacy of the students.
The Echo Staff Member covering the story, Jasper Winterton, first contacted anyone named by the initial sources who brought the issue up to him. In addition to this, he reached out to the principal/assistant principals, student officer, and counselor in charge of the grades the sources were in when the alleged SA occurred.
He ended up contacting various staff members to ensure the stories lined up and interviewed and reached out to specific administrators accused of covering up the allegations to ensure that they had an opportunity to comment on them. In doing this, we made sure to keep a log of every time he reached out to anyone and all information gathered to make sure everything lined up and that we were telling the best truth possible.
To avoid the harassment or backlash for any victims of the incidents, we ensured that the privacy of these students was maintained as they were able to stay anonymous and only Jasper and our advisor, Donald Johnson, were aware of who these specific sources were.
In addition to this, Jasper contacted SPLC about what precautions to take and how to deal with some of the backlash. Its representative also read over the final draft of the story and was extremely helpful in our process of covering this topic.
The story took three months to complete due to the intense issue being covering and the safety of the students and ability for Hixson staff to make a comment. Some of the administrators from the school did not respond so in our print issue we were diligent to include that we had reached out but they had not responded in order to show that they were given the opportunity to respond.
After this story was published, the Echo received some backlash from Hixson and other staff members accusing our editor of malicious intent, however because we took the legal precautions, we were confident that there would be no legal repercussions.
Arianna Peper 
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