By Wendy Wallace
Director, Poynter High School Journalism Program
Mixed among the stories about long
lines in the school cafeteria and student government news, the best
high school journalists take on the big stories, too. See how the nation’s high school journalists covered Katrina and its effects on people’s lives and how the story resonates with young people nationwide.
Find
out how interviewing storm refuges in a Texas shelter changed the life
and outlook of Lacie Richardson, a student reporter at Pine Tree High
in Longview, Texas. See how teenage page designers at schools across
the country handled the gripping photos and the graphics showing the
facts and figures of one of the biggest stories in their young lives.
Ball
State University gathered these pages and posted them online with help
from teachers on a listserv of the Journalism Education Association.
In
a column on the web site, Lacie’s journalism teacher says it this
way: “Three days after Katrina blew through the Gulf Coast
region, my yearbook staff sat on the sidewalk outside a Red Cross
shelter in Longview, Texas, talking to a New Orleans senior who had
seen his high school submerged in 20 ft. of water as he watched the
evening news,” writes Susan Duncan, who has advised student newspapers
and yearbooks in Texas for 18 years. Duncan created a blog
(katrinastories.blogspot.com) for student journalists to share their
experiences covering the story.
“As
a journalism teacher, I wanted my students to get the story of the
year; as an educator, I wanted them to make a difference,” she writes.
“Hopefully, as the year plays out, we can say we have accomplished
both.”
“The point of the site’s content—in the stories that
students and teachers wrote and in the gallery of pages—was to show how
schools can cover national events by showing how it has effects on
their local community,” says Adam Maksl, a graduate assistant in the
Department of Journalism at Ball State who worked on the project.
“As a person studying scholastic journalism, I am very
impressed by the job that many of these high school journalists did to
localize such an important story,” Maksl writes in an e-mail. “Most
didn’t just recap what the big news outlets were telling them. They
went out and found the local angle and showed how an event hundreds or
thousands of miles away can impact them.”
A good lesson for student journalists, and all journalists.
