So the city you cover is considering raising property taxes and your editor wants a story today. If you’re like many journalists, you didn’t get a lot of training in college on municipal budgets. Where do you begin? We’re here to give you some pointers.

Writing about property taxes, a main revenue source for local government, can be complicated. But we can get started by asking these three questions:

As the United States becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, education leaders are pushing for greater diversity among public school teachers. A growing body of research suggests children benefit in many ways from having a teacher of the same race or ethnicity. Published studies, for example, suggest black students do better in reading and math and are less likely to be suspended from school when they have black teachers.

Legislation like the Clean Water Act has helped check the effluent flowing into rivers and streams. Though that fight is far from over, a new, all-too-modern danger has meanwhile seeped invisibly into waters around the world: legal and illegal drugs. And their effect on the ecosystem is poorly understood.

Due to the intense nature and duration of the post-9/11 conflicts, the United States has needed to help an increasingly large pool of veterans who require long-term medical and mental health care. More than 1 million Americans served in the Iraq war alone.