1st Place, News Story
2021-22, Division MS, News Writing
By Satvika Ramanathan
The Cougar Star
Clague MS
This year, in order to help bring student voices out and to try to hear and solve issues that students think are important, principals Jason Skiba and Jennifer Daddow wanted to have a teacher lead a student council to have a team of kids to represent the student body, so they decided to reach out to Spanish teacher Andrea Jakubowski.
“I was surprised at first,” Jakubowski said. “But the more the idea sank in, the more excited I became and the more honored I felt to get the chance to lead it and to work with some of the student leaders in the building.”
Even though this is Jakubowski’s first year of fully in-person teaching at Clague, she said she felt comfortable, and the student council has played a good part in that.
“I definitely saw the connection with the school right away,” Jakubowski said. “It’s one of the reasons I was excited to participate in student council. Even though it wasn’t my idea, I thought it was a perfect solution because it’s requiring me to constantly talk to everybody. Other teachers are reaching out to me. I’m reaching out to them. I’m getting to know students that aren’t in my class, which is nice.”
The kids in student council have also really enjoyed working with Jakubowski.
“Mrs. Jakubowski is a really good helper,” eighth-grade student council member Faith Weems said. “She’s really understanding and lenient with the schedule, and she lets you help as much as you want and give ideas that she’ll listen to and take into consideration.”
The group has also faced some challenges though. COVID, for example, terminated school-wide assemblies, rewards and prizes for participating in activities and other large group exercises that the student leaders and Jakubowski were looking forward to planning. They’ve also faced the issue of being the first ever student council at Clague Middle School in multiple years, so they had to completely start things from scratch.
Even then, things have been moving forward.
“I was concerned about COVID restrictions — what we could or couldn’t do as far as the socialization part,” Jakubowski said. “Another concern was just that there hadn’t been a student council at Clague in years. We’ve had to build it from the ground up, but it’s been great so far, and there’s definitely a lot of enthusiasm.”
The student council has already been able to accomplish a couple of things in the short time they’ve been meeting, such as the Penny Wars, where the three grades competed to collect the most amount of pennies, and money overall for food banks to win advisory pizza or popcorn parties. They’ve collected a total of 900 dollars. Sixth grade won with $410.35 and +9835 points, followed by eighth grade with $335 and +1100 points, and with seventh grade at the back with $141.00 and -1500 points.
“Seeing how much people are interested makes me feel really happy and proud,” Weems said. “I feel like a lot of times people lose hope in humanity because they see all the horrible things on the news and such, but I feel like when we do stuff like this in our school it kind of reassures us there still are good people out there who do good things and are really generous.”
As of now, there is only an eighth-grade student council, but there are plans to include sixth and seventh graders in the year. The seventh-grade student council is set to start in January and sixth-grade is going to have their student council start in the spring. Math teacher Kelly Lamberjack is also going to run sixth grade student council with Jakubowski, and she is also helping out with eighth grade student council currently. Students who have any questions or want to know more about the student council can email Jakubowski at jakubowskia@aaps.k12.mi.us.
NW-02. News Story
News stories should report but not interpret events that have news value and timeliness to the publication’s readers. Advance stories may be included in this category; follow-up stories should be submitted in NW-03. Submit a PDF of the print page(s) on which the story was published or the URL to the story on an online news site.
JUDGING CRITERIA
- Sharp, attention-getting lead that underscores news story importance
- The most important, relevant and timely information is near the beginning of the story
- Emphasizes news elements, i.e. timeliness, nearness, impact, and prominence
- Shows thorough reporting skills; develops an understanding of the issues/problems through interviews with varied and balanced sources
- Effective use of facts/quotes gathered predominantly from primary sources. Secondary sources, if used, are cited appropriately.
- Avoids opinion unless properly attributed
- Sentences, paragraphs of varied length; written clearly, concisely, and vividly
- Proper diction/grammar; use of third person