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Guest commentary by xxx

Open door policies
Bret Bradigan, OVN publisher

These are dark days indeed for the craft of journalism. Given the smoke of fury and schadenfreude surrounding the New York Times' revelations about its troubled reporter Jayson Blair, the truly troubling issues have been obscured.

With the Great Gray Lady losing its hard-earned credibility faster than Bill Bennett at the craps table, it is easy to lose sight of the damage being done to those earnest and curious students of today who will be the front-line messengers of tomorrow.
We hosted a a bright-eyed group of students from Summit School Wednesday morning, who have been putting out a school newspaper under the auspices of parent and adviser Nomi Morris Rush. She is a distinguished globe-trotting journalist, most recently the Jerusalem bureau chief for Knight Ridder Newspapers. Giving the benefit of her experience to these children, regaling them with tales of sending dispatches from Iraq with a satellite phone, she has managed to give them the benefit of experience most grade-schoolers will likely never encounter. And while they may not appreciate it now, someday they will note these moments with gratitude when they take stock of the influences on their lives.

The Condor Times is a 10-page compendium of school news, along with advice columns and horoscopes, for a school with fewer than 100 students. It is journalism in the trenches, where the total of photographers, editors, reporters and columnists nearly equals the number of readers. Thus, its impact is proportionally greater for those students than dispatches from afar. The more local, the better, as we like to say at community newspapers.

Such exemplary examples of schools going above and beyond the call of informing their students are becoming fewer and farther between.

Looking to close the gap on a $2.2 billion deficit in California's education budget, all "non-essential" programs, such as arts, music and language, are coming under close scrutiny, and journalism programs will be among the first to go. There is a real danger that school administrators, many of whom regard their student newspapers as a potential source of trouble and seldom as a potential source of vocational outlet, will shut these papers down. It's already happening to a growing number of student newspapers.

The San Marin High Pony Express has just put their final ham in the smokehouse, as we in trade like to say (well, like I say, anyway). It is the last high school newspaper left among the 14 high schools in Novato, the picturesque Bay Area suburb.

It's always a struggle to get information to people, and in the current climate, jammed between the rock of budget cuts and the hard place of sanctioned secrecy, journalism advisers and teachers are losing ground. According to an article in Wednesday's San Francisco Chronicle, in the 2001-02 school year, there were 32,452 students enrolled in 1,456 high school journalism courses, a 12 percent drop from the 36,847 students in 1,607 courses in 1997-98, during a time when the overall number of students has increased more than 10 percent.

One parent of a student at San Marin High urged the board to save the paper, "The Pony Express gives me hope that somewhere good writing has not been written off," said Jordan Shields, at a recent school board meeting, noting that working on a newspaper gives students great insight into art, economics, math, music, drama, civics and history. It is a natural place for curious students to slake their intellectual thirst. Even those who decide to pursue other interests, other careers, will at least have had that exposure to a wider world, have learned skills of critical thinking, of interviewing, of information extraction, of verification, of holding people in power accountable, of all the myriad skills that journalism teaches
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In the short term, no harm done really. Cash-strapped districts save a little money, not much, though, because most journalism advisers also teach, and merely one possibility among many is precluded. But in the long run, we cannot tell how many more possibilities will be lost to those bright, engaged students because that one was severed. For some students, it might have been their best hope, the key to life's door, and all the adventures that await beyond.

© 2003 The Ojai Valley News

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