Florence Snyder
Facts may have died in 2012, but the obituary has yet to reach a handful of plucky high school kids who know that local news is important, and work hard to bring it to their classmates.
The Daytona Beach News-Journal’s Erica Breunlin takes a deep dive into the shallow pool of secondary school resources for kids who aspire to careers in truth-telling, or just want to learn how to be smarter consumers of current events. As usual, it’s the teachers who are doing the heavy lifting, with very little help from individuals and institutions who claim to care about civics, civility, and surveys that show that young people can’t tell the difference between truth and tripe.
“I won’t let this thing die,” vows DeLand High School’s April Sniffen. “This thing” is The Growler, a delightfully-named school newspaper that’s been around since the 1920s, and has added an online edition to the workload, even as student participation has dwindled by dozens in the years she has served as sponsor.
Over at University High, Courtney Kohler-Hanks spends a lot of uncompensated time teaching herself to teach journalism. Like Sniffen, she has no professional training in the news business, but understands that too many kids are consuming too many empty infotainment calories and have too little access to reliable information about what is happening in the places that matter most in their own lives.
“Anecdotally, we have a sense that many schools are de-emphasizing journalism and reducing or eliminating funding for newspapers because of primarily budget constraints,” Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, told the News-Journal.
“There’s also no doubt,” LoMonte added, “that students are being discouraged from pursuing journalism largely because of the uncertainty with career prospects.”
Somehow, some kids refuse to be discouraged. They’re working to “localize broader news topics and involve student voices”; “branch students’ news knowledge out past their own points of interest”; and give their readers “information about what’s going on in this school.”
“I definitely think that journalism has a bright future,” University High’s managing editor Savannah Sicurella, enthusiastically and correctly told the News-Journal.
It’s a refreshing contrast to the 60-something editors who stopped covering cops, courts, city commissions, and school boards and have the nerve to bash subscribers who left them to forage on Facebook for news of the neighborhood where they live.
