My high school had over 2,000 students.
It was the only one in the city — there’s something deeply horrific about herding every teenager in the area into one building. Each person knew everyone and no one. While we were familiar with most faces and names, we weren’t great at maintaining any semblance of school spirit. I talked to the IB kids and music kids, had the odd friend or two that preferred the sports teams — but everyone had their own clubs and social circles and never really knew what was going on outside of them.
I started getting interested in journalism in grade 10. I researched high school newspapers in BC and beyond and slowly started racking up a list of personal favourites. As I read about what other kids my age had to say on politics, sports and the arts, I realized I was actually interested in all of these areas I had otherwise disregarded — I just needed to hear perspectives outside of my own to realize how special these communities were.
I was disappointed to find out that my high school had nothing of the sort. Was this why everyone seemed so disconnected from each other?
Fortunately, I was a stubborn kid who would stop at nothing to reach my goals, so I decided to start a newspaper myself.
I built a space for students to share the things that mattered to them, and to expose their projects to new audiences. I wanted our school to have a hub for information — a place where we all could come together to better understand the people we saw every day and knew nothing about.
It took a few months to get the project off the ground. I needed to find a sponsor teacher who could invest an insane amount of time and effort into my plan (and could also put up with my late night emails and constant hounding whenever I came up with new ideas). I worked with a couple different teachers over the years that followed, all of whom were relentlessly willing to believe in me.
But what kept us from actually flourishing was our school’s administration. They loved the idea of having a newspaper, but weren’t always willing to do what was needed to help it run smoothly and become an initiative that could benefit students.
We were expected to run all content by them before it was published. But each time, they took nearly months to upload it to our school’s website — and never without constant pushes from myself and our teacher sponsor. It was impossible to get content out, and by the time anything was actually published, it had become outdated and was impossible to find on the website.
Early on in the paper’s conception, I tried to publish a piece on the inaccessibility of a program run by our school. I was informed that I would not be allowed to publish the piece and never got an explanation for why I couldn’t.
I tried over and over again to set up meetings with the administration to work through their concerns and eventually all I got was a brief phone call with no useful feedback.
Even if my work was flawed — and, given that I was a high school student who still knew nothing about investigative journalism and received no guidance, I’m sure it was — I knew I still deserved an explanation.
I came to school to learn, and what was I asking for if not to be taught how to do better?
I found the Student Press Freedom Act (SPFA) campaign completely by chance on Instagram almost a year later. I was amazed that people my age were out there advocating for press freedom. I connected with the students behind the campaign and we posted about the incident I had faced — we then saw the post promptly get taken down, and I was asked to speak with our school’s administration and a representative from the district.
I was overjoyed. Sure, I was being reprimanded, but I was finally getting some sort of response — I just wished I didn’t have to go public with my story for it to happen.
The meeting that followed still offered no clarity on the situation. I never found out why my piece had never seen the light of day.
There were also no changes in how my newspaper was treated going forward. We offered to build a website where we could publish everything ourselves to lighten our admin team’s load, but they insisted that we still publish our content solely on the school website. After that final meeting, they finally made us our own page on the site instead of just dropping our issues in the random news feed, but they stopped updating that page before my senior year had even ended.
We went back to putting our issues on Google Drive and spreading them around social media — but this was only sustainable for about one more year.
Since I graduated, the newspaper seems to have died down. It became impossible for a few high school students to keep pushing for something that was meant to benefit an entire school, without support.
Throughout my three years running the project, I fumbled through teaching myself how to be an editor. I messed up countless times and did things that I certainly wouldn’t even think about trying now. But I know I wouldn’t be where I am now without those years of experience under my belt — and I’d like to think that my work benefited others.
One of my closest friends, a fellow editor at The Ubyssey, was the driving force behind the SPFA campaign. The student that took over my role at my high school’s newspaper after I graduated is now involved in journalism at UBC, too. So many of the people I work with at The Ubyssey wish they had gotten involved in journalism earlier, but came from schools like mine that didn’t offer those opportunities.
High school journalism matters.
It’s just as essential at that point in time as it is in university. It encourages an early interest in staying informed, which means a better understanding of how we can improve as a society — and what is the motive behind education if not a desire to build a better world?
This article is part of The Ubyssey's 2024 student action supplement, Press the Issue.
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