In mid-April, Sara Barber-Just screened “Spotlight,” the 2015 film about The Boston Globe’s investigation of a sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, for her high school journalism students. The students were enthralled. One asked Ms. Barber-Just if she had ever done a similar investigation.

Ms. Barber-Just, a journalism teacher at Amherst-Pelham Regional High School for more than 20 years, laughed and told her class that it was really hard to do an investigation of that scale while in high school. You don’t have a big Spotlight team, she said.

By the next week, a student in her class had begun his own one-month investigation into the school district’s use of prison labor to reupholster all the seats in Amherst-Pelham Regional’s auditorium.

The student, Spencer Cliche, who turned 18 on Friday, published a 3,000-word exposé in the school newspaper this month that shocked the community. Within 24 hours, Ms. Barber-Just saw that nearly a thousand people had clicked on the article . The superintendent issued a statement to school staff members promising never to contract with the prison again.