Applauding student journalism

It can sometimes be hard to remember, in the constant churn of daily life, to stop a moment and take stock of what you’ve accomplished.

This is a bit of life advice — hokey though it may be — that we were reminded of today when reviewing what our high school students have accomplished on our behalf this year.

Week in and week out the Frontiersman’s Schools page is kind of easy to overlook. The usual format is a Frontiersman-produced story paired with one from a student — most often a high school student — and an opinion piece from a teacher.

Not a huge amount of content, really.

But here we are, a couple of months in, and those pages have resulted in 38 pieces of submitted content. Some of them are photos and some of them are stories. All of them are interesting.

That’s 38 times that students and teachers have found something interesting enough that they want to share it with the rest of their community, 38 times that a student who might otherwise not have made an appearance in these pages did so in the form of a confidence-boosting byline or photo credit.

If you haven’t checked it out, today is as good a day as any to read the Schools page. We think it’s fair to say that both topics addressed in submitted pieces — teacher evaluations and Houston High School’s Spirit Week — are ones that more than likely wouldn’t have made the paper had these two Schools writers not tackled them.

Students’ work in the Frontiersman is only the tip of the iceberg this year. In addition to writing for us, this year students and teachers have collaborated to put together a regular supplement to the Frontiersman, published under the banner of the Mat-Su Gazette. You can find a lot of that content online on these student journalists’ own standalone website, matsugzette.com.

On that site you’ll find stories that run the gamut. There’s a piece about how smaller schools yield better student-teacher ratios. There’s a pretty eye-opening article about ALICE, or Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate, the latest protocols local schools have implemented as a first response in the event of a school shooting. There’s even sports coverage.

There’s still more student news on the websites of the various high schools.

We think all of this is worthy of celebration and not just because we see in these kids a lot of ourselves. We think that student journalism results in a deeper public debate and provides self-confidence and self-esteem to the student journalists.

From our 10-year history with our Schools page we can also say that these stories and photos help students build their resumes, assist them when they apply for college scholarships and build real-world skills in our kids. We’ve kept in touch with a few of our School page graduates and we continue to cheer them on their path. We are proud of our investment in Mat-Su Borough students and the dividends that investment has paid to students, to our business and to our community.

So keep writing, kids. And, we’ll continue reading and cheering your success.