Stardust High School Journalism Program

Stardust Director Dave Cornelius works with students at Miami High School.

Arizona high schools are starting or reviving their journalism programs as a result of a Cronkite initiative to create newsrooms in underserved Arizona high schools.

The program was founded by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University under a grant from the Stardust Foundation of Scottsdale. It is believed to be the first university-based initiative in the country to create newsrooms in high schools, according to Cronkite School Dean Christopher Callahan.

The grant aided schools with large minority populations that do not have school newspapers or viable journalism programs--schools that often don’t have the resources to publish school newspapers.

Under the program, the Cronkite School equipped newsrooms at each of 10 schools with Macintosh computers, scanners, video cameras, digital cameras and software necessary for publishing an online newspaper that could also be published as a print product. The Cronkite School staff helped install the equipment and manages servers that host schools’ Web sites.

Ten Arizona high schools were selected for the program in a competitive process:

• Betty H. Fairfax High School, Phoenix
• Buckeye Union High School, Buckeye
• Coolidge High School, Coolidge
• Douglas High School, Douglas
• Holbrook High School, Holbrook
• Maricopa High School, Maricopa
• Maryvale High School, Phoenix
• Miami High School, Miami
• Sierra Linda High School, Tolleson
• Snowflake High School, Snowflake

Cronkite instructors, often joined by local media professionals, made frequent visits to the schools, providing technical and journalistic training.

Teachers and students from participating schools also attend training covering writing, reporting, editing, Web production, videography and photography as well as journalism ethics, values and First Amendment issues at the Cronkite School’s state-of-the-art building in downtown Phoenix.

The program continues to make an impact on more than 400 students taking a variety of journalism classes and producing multimedia news websites for their schools. All of the schools serve large minority populations and have either lacked a journalism program or have had trouble maintaining a journalism program, mostly due to a shortage of funds.

The Stardust Foundation is a nonprofit corporation founded by Arizona real estate developer and philanthropist Jerry Bisgrove in 1993. Headquartered in Scottsdale, the foundation is designed to selectively provide grants to organizations that impact the linked concepts of family and neighborhood stability.

“Stardust values the opportunity to expose more students to careers in journalism,” Bisgrove said. “The communication skills they will learn in this program will be useful to them, regardless of their chosen profession. In today’s fast-paced, information-driven world, effective communication is vital to achieving success in all facets of one’s life.”

Callahan said that getting more students involved in high school journalism programs will improve their writing and communication skills – and encourage them to graduate from high school and go on to college.