PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — After reviving their school newspaper in fall 2017, students at Presque Isle High School and their English teacher, Marcie Young, began telling the stories of their school community and expanding awareness of issues that affect them all.
In 2016, Young and students involved in publishing the high school’s yearbook attended the National Scholastic Journalism Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana, a mere two days after the presidential election and miles away from the state capital. The group witnessed student journalists from across the country racing toward protests that had begun as a response to the election, pursuing interviews from the protestors.
“It blew my mind how much these students believed in themselves as journalists and how engaged they were with current events,” Young said. “The students here do an excellent job with the yearbook, so I thought they could also do an excellent job with a newspaper of their own.”
Young developed an Intro to Journalism course that offers students the chance to become staff writers for their own news website, The Anchor, and learn journalistic skills such as news, feature and opinion writing; photography; social media promotion; and website design. The course began as a semester-long class with 15 students in fall 2017 and nine in spring 2018.
This year, Young offered the course as a yearlong class and now has four staff writers — Emily Poitras, Peyton Day, Torrie Casey and Carly Guerrette. She now lets students take the course more than once due to the different content they produce each time, which allows them to grow more fully as journalists. Though their assignments are deadline-focused, Young requires that students only write four stories each per quarter so that they can learn more about the writing and editing process.
Many of the stories that students have pursued have been a combination of topics that they’ve already had an interest in as well as important events and administrative conflicts that have arisen within SAD 1. Senior Emily Poitras has taken the journalism course twice and has written about events, school board meetings, and student clubs among other topics as well as produced her own opinion column, The Poitras Point.
One of the hardest issues Poitras has addressed concerned vaping among high school students. To report on the topic fairly, she pursued interviews with teachers, administrators and students who admitted to trying electronic cigarettes.
“Getting students to talk was hard because they knew they were admitting to doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing,” Poitras said. “Some would only talk if we changed their names, which we did.”
Day, also a senior, confronted another challenging topic in fall 2018 when she came across a Facebook post from PIHS graduate Emma O’Connell, who claimed that SAD 1 administrators did nothing to prevent bullying she allegedly endured from a fellow student that she had previously dated. O’Connell was responding to a recently published promotional video from SAD 1 that portrayed the school in a positive light but is one that she felt ignores the issue of bullying that many students face.
As with all articles, Day said, she included quotes from current and former students, including O’Connell, as well as administrators’ responses to their claims. Though the article received mixed reactions among staff and administrators, the experience was still a rewarding one for Day.
“A lot of students reached out to me afterward to say that they had been bullied, too,” Day said.
Young noted that despite the difficult nature of many articles, including one that freshmen students Guerrette and Casey wrote about the departure of former superintendent Brian Carpenter, the school board has remained supportive of The Anchor and the newspaper’s mission.
“I think there’s an attitude here that if we’re going to do something, we’re going to do it well,” Young said. “The response to that [superintendent] article says a lot about how the administration trusts us to do a good job with the news and not just state opinions.”
But the newspaper, Guerrette noted, has given students plenty of opportunities to have fun while building their skills as multimedia journalists. She has created a video slideshow of photos from this year’s winter carnival activities and used The Anchor website’s analytics tool to track which stories most engage readers. She also learned a valuable lesson about the importance of including photos with stories as a way to lure online readers.
“At first, I kept thinking it was easier to write the stories first, then find a photo opportunity,” Guerrette said. “But that’s not how it works. Usually finding a photo at the same time as the story is easier.”
The Anchor is published by Student Newspapers Online, which hosts 2,814 websites for middle school, high school and college newspapers and nonprofit journalism organizations. Three of the students’ stories — Day’s article on bullying, Poitras’ vaping awareness story, and Guerrette’s feature on injured senior athletes — recently received SNO’s Best of Writing badge, which recognizes stories that are engaging to a wide audience, showcase polished writing and editing, are unbiased and between 300 to 800 words in length.
The three Best of SNO awards also earned The Anchor an Excellence in Writing badge that is now displayed on the website’s homepage. The students’ future goals for the newspaper involve submitting stories for other SNO award categories such as multimedia, continuous coverage, audience engagement and website excellence.
Writing for The Anchor has inspired Poitras to pursue a career in journalism. This fall, she will begin studies in Husson University’s journalism program and is excited to explore other mediums such as radio and TV.
“Before this class, I knew that I loved writing, but now I know that journalism is what I want to do,” Poitras said. “I love how interactive journalism is and how you’re not just sitting in a classroom.”
Thus far, 13 students have signed up for the 2019-2020 section of Young’s class, which she hopes will expand the amount of stories The Anchor can publish and the newspaper’s presence in the school community. She would also love to one day have a veteran student journalist serve as an editor and take the class on a trip to attend the National Scholastic Journalism Conference.
“The newspaper has had a soft opening, but now we’re more focused on building a culture around what we’re doing and making people aware,” Young said. “Everything has been a great learning experience.”
