For the 10th time, Enterprise editor Melissa Hale-Spencer was recognized among the best opinion writers in the weekly press.

The Golden Dozen awards were announced recently by the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors. In the society’s annual contest, opinion writers are judged for their editorial skills and courage, with the best of the top dozen winning the Golden Quill award.

Hale-Spencer was awarded for the editorial “Ignoring child victims is easy, absorbing truth is hard,” written after a Lynnwood Elementary School teacher was charged with endangering the welfare of a child.

“This entry is far too long for an editorial — and yet, I’m not sure it could have been told as well in a shorter form,” the judge wrote. “It details a long-hidden story of sexual abuse by a beloved teacher, as well as a history in the community of covering up similar wrongdoing. It’s a damning piece and a wake-up call to not only this school district but to enablers everywhere."

The editorial was based on stories written by Elizabeth Floyd Mair and was illustrated by Carol Coogan.

Hale-Spencer, 66, has edited The Altamont Enterprise & Albany County Post for more than 20 years and became a co-publisher in July 2015. She was first named to the Golden Dozen in 1999. In 2008, she won the Golden Quill, for the editorial “We, the people, are responsible for what our government does.”

Hale-Spencer graduated from Guilderland High School, where she was an editor at The Journal, and from Wellesley College, where she wrote for The Wellesley News.

She learned to write from her father, a lifelong newspaperman. She took her first reporting job when her parents called on her to help at their Adirondack weekly, The Lake Placid News, in 1975, where her future husband, Gary Spencer, also began a career in journalism.

Hale-Spencer started writing for The Enterprise as a young mother of two daughters in the 1980s. She introduced the first regular, strongly worded editorials to The Enterprise, writing them as a part-time reporter covering the Helderberg Hilltowns and assumed the masthead in 1996 as co-editor with fellow staff writer Andrew Schotz.