This is Not Fake News...

At the start of the school year, I started a student newspaper at my daughters’ K-8 school. With the media landscape changed so dramatically and the term “fake news” now part of our lexicon, I wanted to teach the students about news and its critical role in democracy. I had learned about this as a journalism student at Syracuse University and then as a newspaper reporter for nearly 15 years.

I wasn’t sure how many students would show up to the first meeting. I hoped for maybe 20-25. I ordered three pizzas as a treat for those who came and scheduled them to be delivered during our meeting.

When the end-of-day bell rang, students started streaming into the classroom I had reserved for the meeting. It could hold about 25 students comfortably. Within minutes, there were 90 students packed in the room, standing against the walls, sitting on the floors, seated in chairs. I was nearly in tears: This many kids cared about news?!

As we talked about the definition of news those first few weeks, the students asked if we could cover the hurricane or tornado they heard about on the news. I told them weather stories or other stories that impacted things outside our school or community were not good topics for our student newspaper.

“However,” I told them, “if there was a big event that affected our school – a snowstorm that closed school or lightning that hit and damaged the building – we’ll write about it.”

This is history

Well, here we are, in the midst of one of the largest pandemics in world history, COVID-19. The school is closed for at least three weeks and maybe more. All school sports and activities are canceled. The beloved school play is indefinitely postponed. Kids are limited to socializing largely by Zoom or FaceTime.

This is NEWS! This is real, historic, affects-our-school-immensely news!

Most reporters don’t get to cover a historic event like this in their career, but here are these fourth through eighth graders getting to write about it in elementary and middle school!

Like nearly everyone else trying to communicate, collaborate, plan and work, our newspaper club held a Zoom meeting. The story list we had planned two weeks ago? It needed to be reviewed and largely discarded. Chess Club and the Robotics competition – now canceled – were no longer news. How the school was handling educating its 600-plus students during this crisis and how students were dealing with it was now the story.

This was not Fake News. This was real. This was history. And the students and their school are a part of it. How will they tell their story?