The Franklin announcements go off every week to update students on events through the school’s PA system. When that sound goes off, it interrupts classes and lessons at often inconvenient times for teachers. Rather than listen, students opt to pick up their phones, completely ignoring the announcements.
Javier Perez, Franklin’s video production teacher, recently started the Franklin newscasting project as “an experiment” aimed to make the announcements into a biweekly video segment. Teachers will be able to choose when to show the video so it won’t disrupt the flow of classes.
Right now, Perez hopes that the program will turn into an after school club where directors can be elected and anchors can audition at the beginning of the year. “I want the club to give everybody a chance to be a part of this idea,” he says
The director, Ivy Clark (12), said that she wants to hear what her classmates are thinking. “Hopefully it will be funny and entertaining but also deliver the announcements,” she says. Clark agrees that the newscasting should be a club so that it can be more inclusive.
Jack Shank (11), a Franklin student and passionate content creator, is a producer on this project. He says when he creates videos he’s “trying to make a story in [his] videos actually worth something,” which he believes he can do on the newscast. Shank said that he hopes “a lot of Franklin students like [the program]… and as long as it’s good, then I think that [they] are going to.”
Walter Atwood (11), editor for the newscasters, thinks that the program should take a “light hearted type of approach” so that it could keep people interested.
In the future, Perez says that the program could take a more journalistic approach. “I would love to do a collaboration between Ms. Kirsch’s journalism class and our class,” he says. Perez thinks that the journalism class could do the stories, and the newscasters could do the technical support and filming.
The newscasting team has big plans for the future and hopes to make the program more diverse, but for right now they just want to make an enjoyable experience for the Franklin community.
