IVHigh: Our contribution to education

It’s fitting that the school where I cut my journalism teeth would be the same school where I would deliver the first IVHigh presentation earlier this week.

In the fall of 1991, as a senior at Central Union High School, I was introduced to something that would become my passion, my career and my life — writing, news, newspapers, journalism. I joined Central’s longtime student newspaper, The Shield, and took my first steps toward becoming a 20-year fixture here at the Imperial Valley Press, where I serve as local content editor and supervise a team of reporters.

On Tuesday afternoon I spoke to English instructor Michael Hobbs’ fourth-period journalism class and promised them one thing: you’ll be seeing a lot of me, almost once a week, nearly every week until June.

On Thursday, I visited Southwest High School and Aja Hood’s sixth-period journalism class, and next Friday, it’s Erasmo Zayas’ program at Calexico High.

Eventually, all eight high schools will hear the gospel of IVHigh, a multi-faceted high school journalism project developed by the Imperial Valley Press that will involve an estimated 80 or more students across the Imperial Valley in publishing online campus-based journalism through writing, photography, raw video, even social media like Twitter.

The publishing is just the carrot, the prize to a year of learning the fundamentals of journalism from talented teachers and advisers on campus and through the proven efforts of local professionals who have made bringing the community its news their stock in trade.

IVHigh, for all intents and purposes, is the definition of what it means to implement the new Common Core State Standards educators have been talking about, students have been hearing about and what parents might just be discovering.

Education in California and throughout much of the nation is now set up to better prepare our children for college and the work force through reinforcing lessons by doing, by the practical application of source material in a real-world setting.

We set out to implement IVHigh without fully realizing how its debut would dovetail so perfectly with the debut of Common Core curriculum. All we wanted to do was help.

Help bring journalism education back to local high schools in the wake of state budget cuts that cut deep into many non-core offerings. Help excite young readers about what we do and how we do it. Help educate on the founding principles of the vocation that are tested and often lost in the instantaneous and unchecked world of social media and the opinion-heavy landscape of 24-hour news delivery.

These are important lessons, all of them, and they factor heavily into the 150 pages of lesson plans, exercises, interactive materials and examples we have put together over the last year.

Every school is on board. All of the superintendents were gauged on their interest last October, many principals and teachers were trained and presented with our materials in both late spring and in recent and upcoming weeks, and a lot of talk and theory is now in action, with the start of school at the Central Union High district.

Kathie Francis’ publications class at Imperial High was a testing site of the program last spring, where several of her students wrote stories and took photos for Imperial’s IVHigh beta website, but only after hearing presentations from me on libel and ethics, story construction, idea generations and hearing about photojournalism from writer and trained photographer Chelcey Adami.

In the next couple of weeks, IVHigh.com will go live and begin to be updated. At first, readers will see a class photo of each “news team” on their individual school pages with an explanation of what we are doing. The student will come first in the Twitter pane in the upper right of each page.

In mid-October, however, the first wave of student work will be published all at once. And then again five more times throughout the school year. All of this content will also be available via a free mobile app scheduled to be ready sometime around the first publication date, an app that will also feature each school’s sports information from MaxPreps.com.

It’s all pretty cool, and we think pretty innovative, but it starts with the education and the idea that a free and informed society through principled journalism is the greatest society on earth and an idea worth spreading to the next generation.

On the Web: www.ivhigh.com
On mobile: download the IVHigh app from the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store

This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, Aug. 16, 2013.