by Joanna Klonsky
SOUTH BURLINGTON, VT—“Good morning! This is Riya Patel on the South Burlington Network News, the news kids choose!” It’s not exactly the greeting you’d expect to hear from your news anchor in the morning. But at Fredrick Tuttle Middle School in South Burlington, Vermont, students literally run all aspects of their own television news studio, which broadcasts daily to the 30,000 viewers across Vermont.
“We try to use SBNN to teach students team building, problem solving, critical thinking, all of those skills that we want in our kids today,” says teacher Jay Hoffman. “We found that this is a unique way to grow those skills. We also want our kids to be socially connected with their communities. We’re making political activists out of them, in a positive sense.”
Six years ago, Hoffman and a fellow teacher used grant money to buy the studio equipment and a television for every classroom and the front office. Since then, the school has gradually upgraded its broadcast studio. “Our intent was to turn out a student who had a mix of artistic creativity and technological background,” says Hoffman.
A Multitasking Team
“We broadcast live every Friday,” says Patel, an eighth grader in her second year as a member of SBNN. “Everyone learns how to do different jobs—anchors, iMacs, cameras, mixers, Teleprompters, soundboards—and everyone learns how to do almost everything so that we can all be multitasking.” There are ten students on the SBNN team at the moment, all sixth, seventh and eighth graders. The team members “all know every job on the set,” says Hoffman. “I am not allowed on the set during shows. It is all student led.” Patel, 13, is a senior editor on SBNN. “I like editing a lot. We film stuff around the school, and then once we import all of our footage on Final Cut Express, our video editing software, that’s where I like to edit it down and make a story out of it,” she says.
When Neel Desai, an eighth grader now in his third year on the SBNN team, started at Tuttle Middle School, he says, “I walked past the SBNN studio a couple of times and I noticed it looked really cool.” He took Hofffman’s broadcasting class, and signed up for the SBNN team soon after. “In sixth grade, I started learning all the equipment and software,” Desai says. “Last year I was the head technician on our team, so whenever we got new equipment I would always hook it up, and teach the other members on the team. It’s been really fun.”
Making and Breaking the News
SBNN produces stories relating to the daily goings-on in Tuttle Middle School, and beyond. When Desai visited his family in India over his summer vacation last year, he carried in tow SBNN equipment, and produced a story following a day in the life of an Indian student at an international school.
SBNN students recently interviewed Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT). “The police department brings my students to shoots anywhere they want to go, within reason.” says Hoffman. “Leahy knows our team. He made a date for them. The police department drove the kids down to location and they shot some footage with him. I don’t go with them. They're trained. The idea is for them to be responsible.”
Now, SBNN is partnering with teenluresprevention.com, a private foundation dedicated to protecting youth from sexual predators. With teenluresprevention.com, SBNN recently became the first middle school broadcast team to deliver the Teen Lures Broadcast, aimed at teaching young people about sexual crime prevention. “We want them to find issues in their communities to do their stories on. It’s become quite a force,” says Hoffman. “With this latest endeavor, teenluresprevention.com, for the first time in this country we’ve got kids talking to kids about sexual crime prevention.”
In 2008, SBNN was named the national winners of the eSchool News Empowered Education Award and the team was flown to Washington, D.C. to be honored. This year, they won third prize in C-SPAN’s StudentCam 2009 competition with a segment pointing to the U.S. economy as the most urgent issue facing President Barack Obama. SBNN’s segment will air on C-SPAN on April 8, 2009 at 6:50 am ET.
“We try to teach the kids that they have power through media,” says Hoffman. “We teach them to be responsible with that power, and how to use that power for good.”
“SBNN has brought a new age to technology,” says Patel. “Not many schools have this much technology. We’ve been doing a lot with it, and now we’re teaching kids around the whole world about how important technology is.”
