Save Newspapers at Public Schools

Note: this article originally appeared in the Sacramento Bee, see it here.

Sacramento’s Charles Kenny McClatchy High School is about as indebted to newspapers as a school can be. Most obviously, our name honors the Bee editor and founder of the McClatchy publishing company. In addition, many of our most esteemed alumni - including Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and author Joan Didion - have written for our 78-year-old school newspaper. So when my journalism class was informed we’d be defunded, a momentary identity crisis ensued. McClatchy High without a newspaper class? Blasphemous.

That irony is unique to our school, but the plight of our Prospector is not. Rather, it’s part of a larger divorcing of public schools from journalism that hurts both parties and society as a whole.

Budgets are tight, and because journalism isn’t a core subject, it has essentially become a luxury for deep-pocketed schools. In Sacramento, the major privates - Jesuit, Saint Francis, Christian Brothers, and Country Day - all have newspapers. As for public schools? I called fifty from districts throughout the area, and only nineteen do.

Even among public schools, money matters. “Most of the wealthy suburban schools have full journalism programs,” California Scholastic Journalism Initiative director Steve O’Donoghue told me via email. “Most of the urban, non-wealthy schools don’t.”

The numbers concur. US News and World Report’s high-school profiling system quantifies a school’s “economic disadvantage” by the percentage of its students that qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. I spoke with twelve schools whose percentages were 30% or less, and seven of them had student newspapers. In comparison, only two of the eleven schools I talked to whose percentages exceeded 70% did. The Roseville and Rocklin districts were the only where more than half of schools have papers (not including the Davis district, which has only one traditional high school). By all accounts, a school’s poverty is inversely related to its chances of having a newspaper.

But it’s in the poorest schools that a newspaper has the most value. Journalism is about exposing the truth in the name of justice. There’s an element of activism inherent, and public schools would benefit greatly from it.

Consider the story of the Davis High multi-purpose room. Davis had lacked an indoor eating space since 2012. Most students ate off-campus or in classrooms, and were therefore unaffected. But special-needs students who needed supervision were hung out to dry.

In late 2014, the school newspaper called attention to the issue, and their efforts made possible a new “All Student Center,” currently under construction. That’s the power of a newspaper in a school environment. What if it could be wielded on other, needier campuses?

After all, the less money a school has, the more likely it is to face problems that a newspaper could tackle. Poorer schools are those plagued by overcrowded classrooms, unqualified teachers, and infrastructural deficiencies. Such schools need a watchdog. They need journalism - and journalism needs them, too.

Most of what we know about the world isn’t from experience. Instead, media informs our perception of every person, place, and thing beyond our reach, thus profoundly influencing our thinking. This is particularly true for newspapers, because they generally do the original research - interviewing, data-crunching, etc. - recycled by TV and internet news outlets.

Because newspaper stories are the building blocks of our perceptions, it’s imperative that they be told by people from different backgrounds, with different perspectives. A worldview shaped from a singular angle will inevitably be lopsided. If journalism isn’t prioritized at schools with greater socioeconomic diversity, however, the newsrooms of the future will homogenize. And we’ll all pay the price unknowingly.

The relationship between public schools and journalism is symbiotic - schools benefit from the accountability imposed by a newspaper; newspapers (and everyone, by extension) benefit from a diverse pool of trained journalists. It is also endangered - but it doesn’t have to be. McClatchy’s Student Union fought to secure the class for at least one more semester, and the same can be done elsewhere. It should be. More is at stake here than tradition, even for a school named McClatchy.