Investigative Series Win Statewide Awards

The Houston Chronicle's series on special education and safety hazards at chemical plants both won big Sunday at the Associated Press Managing Editors' awards. The seven-part "Denied" series on special education quotas won the first-place awards for community service, freedom of information, online package of the year and star investigative report of the year. The "Chemical Breakdown" series on uncovering Houston's hidden world of toxic releases won first place in the "Team Effort" category. The series showed how thousands of disabled children in Texas were denied specialized instruction guaranteed by federal law, exposing a long-standing but previously unreported Texas policy setting a quota on special education services at no more than 8.5 percent of students in any of the state's 1,200 school districts. Lisa Falkenberg, a previous Pulitzer Prize winner, won first place in the "star opinion writer of the year" category. Katherine Blunt, a Hearst fellow now with the Chronicle, won first place in business reporting for work she did at the San Antonio Express-News.