Small Schedule Change, Big Impact

I’ve always viewed journalism as a way to effect change simply by presenting facts. I found truth in this view during my days as a staff writer and editor for my high school’s newspaper.

In August 2000, the honors journalism class at Bishop McNamara High School was just a way to beef up my schedule for 10^th grade.

The school made an error, and did not place me in my Latin II class for the year. Latin II met at the same time as Honors Geometry and Trigonometry. After sitting down with my Latin teacher and determining that I could take Latin as an independent study, I still needed another credit.

“Why not journalism?” Ms. Millner, my guidance counselor, asked me. My mother and I looked at each other. My mother’s raised eyebrows repeated the question.

“Well, what do they do in that class?” I asked. I had always wanted to be on the school’s newspaper, The Stang, but assumed it was an after-school club. Ms. Millner told me the students in the journalism class produced the monthly publication.

I signed up. My experience at The Stang was not what I expected, since our principal had a lot of say about what went into each issue. Some of our story ideas, like one about whether students at school were pro-life or pro-choice, were shot down because they flew in the face of Catholic teachings.

Other stories, like one about why there was a Nike sign hanging in the gym when the school’s president said at a liturgy two years earlier that the school would not endorse any companies that used sweatshop labor, fostered change and caused controversy in the hallways.

“They [the administration] let you write that?” Robyn Harris, a reserved girl who never said much, asked me one day during our junior year.

 “Of course,” I answered. “Why wouldn’t they?”

 “It makes them look like hypocrites,” she said incredulously.

Maybe they were hypocrites, but the Nike sign came down the next day. However, the contract between the school and Nike endured. The men’s and women’s varsity basketball teams continued to wear team shoes, uniforms and warm-ups all emblazoned with that familiar swoosh.

This incident taught me that journalism has the ability to make changes, however small, in society.

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© 2005 Lindsay N. Smith