By Kata Rothhorn & Audrey Rauscher
Portrait
East Lansing HS
1st Place Division 3, News Writing
News Story
JUDGING CRITERIA
- Sharp, attention-getting lead that underscores news story importance
- Uses inverted pyramid
- Emphasizes news elements, i.e. timeliness, nearness, impact, and prominence
- Shows thorough reporting skills
- Effective use of facts/quotes from both primary and secondary sources
- Avoids opinion unless properly attributed
- Sentences, paragraphs of varied length; written clearly, concisely, and vividly
- Proper diction/grammar; use of third person
Swim practice began as usual on Tuesday, Oct 1 at 5:45 a.m., but it wasn’t supposed to end with co-captain Alexa DeMuth (12) being the only one in the pool fifteen minutes before practice was over. “I was swimming and coming back to the wall,” DeMuth said. “And then suddenly no one was in the water. I looked up and everyone was out of the pool saying ‘you need to get out now.’” About halfway through practice, swimmer Addison Bennett (9) received an urgent phone call from her mother saying she was on her way to pick Bennett up — the high school was closed due to a school shooting threat. Swim coach Brian Post immediately checked his email and rushed his team out of the pool and into the locker room without time for a shower. In less than five minutes, the entire swim team was running out of the locker rooms, flippers and kickboards left scattered on the pool deck. As they tried to coordinate last minute rides for everyone in the parking lot, Assistant Principal Nick Hamilton drove up in his pickup truck, on his way to warn the team about the threat. At 11:04 p.m. Monday night, Principal Andrew Wells and Hamilton received an email notifying them of a possible threat to the school. Early the next morning, Hamilton woke to the email and alerted Superintendent Dori Leyko. According to Leyko, the email itself was not a threat but was instead from an anonymous sender that claimed to have heard a student might shoot up the school. It appeared as though the sender was attempting to alert school administrators and inform them students were worried about coming to school. After getting in contact with the East Lansing Police Department (ELPD) at 6 a.m., Leyko decided to close the school for the day. Immediately, she contacted staff and district employees that coordinate with Dean Transportation and families in the district. Between 6:15 and 6:30 a.m., Leyko posted on the official Facebook and Twitter accounts outlining that ELHS would be closed due to an “email threat” received that morning. After further investigation throughout the day from the ELPD and FBI, it was found that the email was intended for a high school in North Carolina with the identical initials ELHS – East Lincoln High School. “I believe that the sender searched ‘ELHS’ and mistakenly sent the communication to our administrators instead of the intended recipient,” Leyko said. “Later that afternoon, the sender responded to [Hamilton’s] email, and we were able to confirm that the email was not intended for our school.” The administration sent out a clarifying email to families in the district later on in the evening, explaining the situation. However, before it was confirmed that the threat was not intended for East Lansing, all after school activities were cancelled or moved to a secondary location. The girls swim and dive team continued on to their meet in Marshall, Michigan, even though their bus pick-up location was moved to the middle school. The only problem was that they had left their usual suits and goggles in the locker room that morning and weren’t allowed to return to the high school to retrieve their gear. “Since we had to rush out that morning, we couldn’t grab all the stuff we needed,” Freya Dufner (12) said. “Everyone was borrowing everybody else’s stuff…I think one of the girls brought five pairs of goggles for everyone that needed them. Everyone who had an extra suit brought an extra suit.” Some families went out of the way to buy extra suits, goggles and swim caps as the girls gathered all their spare gear to provide for their team.