Commitment to Diversity
Before the school year even started, I knew that diversity was a central goal for our staff. One of the strengths of Lawrence High is our diversity within our student body, and I knew that covering that needed to be a top priority for our publications.
Hall of Honor Representation
Another editor and I had an idea at the end of the first semester to do some investigation into the LHS Hall of Honor. What we found was a stark lack of diversity and minority representation. Thus, one of the biggest reporting projects of the year began. In our April issue of The Budget, we will have a four-page section highlighting people of color we think should be represented in the hall of honor and shine light on those who have been overlooked. Here is the special section of the newspaper and our cover letter from the editors.
Letter from the editors:
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Lawrence High School is filled with rich, diverse history. This year our coverage has sought to encapsulate that diversity. We covered sections of our school’s new mural that highlight civil rights protests held at LHS. We analyzed how racial slurs are used in schools and how they harm minority students.
This coverage led us to dig deeper – where has our coverage, and our school, not fully encapsulated the diverse history of our student body? What better place to look than at our school’s Hall of Honor?
It came to our attention that our Hall of Honor is not an accurate representation of the history of our student body, specifically students of color.
The goal of this project is to tell the stories of the people who are missing from the Hall of Honor. We hope to raise awareness of this lack of representation. The Hall of Honor should be a form of inspiration to students, but we feel there is a disconnect between the demographics of our student body and the people that are included in the Hall of Honor.
Fulfilling our goal requires a few reporting tasks. In this project you will find multiple people of color who were instrumental and impactful in the development of LHS and the city of Lawrence who we believe deserve recognition in the Hall of Honor.
We also feature current people of color in the Hall of Honor. These people have made a significant influence on their city, state and world since graduating from LHS.
Finally we talked to our student body, the driving force behind this project, and talked with them about why this kind of representation matters.
We hope that our reporting accurately reflects the strength, diversity and history of LHS and inspires change that creates more diverse and reflective spaces in LHS institutions in the future.
Making diversity a priority
Before the year began, I knew that reporting on and representing our diverse student body would be a major goal of mine entering the school year. So as soon as I saw a session at the Jayhawk Media Workshop about diversity, I knew I needed to take it. It started me on my path toward making diversity a top priority for The Budget in 2022.
​I learned a couple things from the session but the primary take-away was that diversity was a team effort. Even if I was fully committed to diversity, getting my whole staff on board was necessary. At the end of the day, they are the ones who pitch stories and produce most of our content.
​From the beginning of the year I pushed that staffers pitch a diverse array of ideas drawing from their own varied and unique identities. This, partnered with including diverse sources and viewpoints in stories, was the key role my staff played in diversity.
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Personally, my role as print editor meant lots of tough decisions on what to include in the paper. I worked hard to include a range of voices to make sure the 32 pages were filled with diverse, wide-ranging content.
Coverage with diversity on the forefront
Covering derogatory language
After multiple incidents involving students using slurs on camera and in ways that disrupted the school day, I and my co-editor decided that we needed to cover it. Figuring out how was the hardest part. We decided to survey the student body to get a feel for their experiences and then write a related story.
Highlighting diverse history
After a massive school-wide mural was completed at LHS, we knew that telling the different stories hidden inside of it would be an important task. One section highlighted a history of sit-ins and protests that have been representative of LHS in its 100-plus year history. We decided to write a deep feature on this section of the mural and the stories it represented. And we made sure this story had plenty of space in our print edition.
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