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Eagle Valley High School students to be featured in PBS NewsHour program

Three students created and participated in a show on how students are redefining school life

Langston James, Emit Brown and Sam Elliott (left to right) are all members of the Eagle Valley High School student media class and produce for EVTV. On Tuesday, Jan. 25, their work will be featured on a national PBS NewsHour event about student life in the pandemic.
Joy Hamilton/Courtesy Photo

Throughout the last two years, the pandemic has taken hold of the education system and impacted students. While parents, administrators and community members have talked about what students need, student voices haven’t always been at the forefront of these discussions.

However, next week, three students from Eagle Valley High School’s student media class will be featured on a national PBS NewsHour event sharing stories and talking about issues that matter to them and that may have been overlooked in recent school years.

“None of their stories have to do with the pandemic, which is what I think is kind of important; a lot of these things haven’t been really overshadowed because of this COVID narrative and learning loss and the negative side,” said Joy Hamilton, an English teacher at Eagle Valley High School and the student media faculty advisor. “It’s nice to see what else is going on in education and our students shine a light on some of the really positive things, but also on some of the issues we need to keep paying attention to.”



Eagle Valley High School’s student media program is a PBS Student Reporting Lab, a program that allows students from across the country to work with PBS youth producers to submit and create stories to be produced into the national NewsHour shows.

For this specific event, Sam Elliott and Langston James, both seniors at the high school, produced a story about Ms. V’s skateboarding class at Red Canyon High School and the world of skateboarding in Eagle County. Emit Brown, a sophomore at Eagle Valley High School, participated in a panel discussing transgender student rights.

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The work of all three students will be featured on Tuesday, Jan. 25, on the hour-long PBS NewsHour event titled, “Our New Normal: How Teens are Redefining School Life.” The event starts at 5 p.m. and will be streamed on YouTube. In addition to the pieces that Eagle Valley students contributed to and produced, the event will cover mental health, school safety, teaching race in the classroom and more.

For each student, the opportunity to be involved on the show combined their favorite parts about student media, and gave them real world insight and knowledge about the world of broadcast journalism.

“It’s hard to stay up to date in school broadcast programs with what’s happening in the industry; my favorite part of this program is you hear from people who are in the industry,” Hamilton said. “It’s so nice to have access to that because it’s such a more authentic experience for them and prepares them so much better for what you can actually do in the field and the processes they use, like scripting and things that the industry uses that we maybe didn’t know about in our curriculum.”

Brown said his favorite part of being involved with the class and the PBS program is that it helps get student voices out there.

“I know that, of course, teachers have a lot of opinions, but it’s also nice to give students a chance to speak up so that teachers also know how they can modify their policies and rules and how they can make school a better place to be,” Brown said.

James echoed this sentiment, saying that the class and EVTV helps him connect with the entire Eagle Valley High School community.

“It helps bring everybody together; it helps bring teachers and students together and keep everybody on the same page,” James said.

Through the pandemic, the Eagle Valley student media class helped keep all three students connected to this community as they worked hard to still produce their show and provide the community with valuable information.

“It took a lot of time to get used to how things were going to be, but actually, for my education specifically, this class was really good from me,” Elliott said. “We still had those opportunities to make stories and make packages. It was a lot harder and it was, at times really frustrating, but we still kept making episodes throughout the pandemic, which was really awesome.”

Telling their stories

The students hope that those who watch next week’s show will learn new ways to help and teach students.
Joy Hamilton/Courtesy Photo

In the upcoming PBS show, the students’ hard work will be on display. For each of these student media shows PBS puts out a prompt, and then students from across the country are able to submit their ideas, and then only a handful are selected to be featured on the show.

For Elliott and James, the skateboarding story came about pretty naturally. Elliott had previously worked with the skateboarding class’s teacher, Ms. V, and thought that the PBS prompt was the perfect opportunity to showcase a unique student experience being offered in Eagle County.

“We’re covering her class and just showing people what the class is about, but then we’re also talking about the skateboarding culture and community in Eagle Valley,” Elliott said. “One of the big topics that we’re addressing is how skateboarding can be such a healthy and beneficial activity for a lot of people, but it’s not really often utilized. Schools are offering things like traditional sports teams, and we kind of think that skateboarding should be offered as well.”

Brown’s participation on the panel about trans rights also came naturally as he had previously worked with PBS on a video about LGBTQ education. The panel includes several transgender and non-binary students and was pre-recorded over winter break for next Tuesday’s show.

“It was mostly about our experiences in school and how we wanted it to be different, how teachers and students are, what it’s like changing your pronouns and your name mid-school year, trying to get kids to actually use them, so it just highlighted the things that we hide that we don’t necessarily want to,” Brown said.

Brown added that the student panel discussed topics like gender-neutral restrooms, going outside of the binary and other big debates.

“I’m hoping teachers or administrators see this and take it as an example of what they should do and how they should treat kids as a whole; it’s not just kids of the LGBTQ community, it’s pretty much everyone,” Brown said. “We need more equity in our schools, and I’m hoping that teachers take this panel and this whole special as an example of what they should do.”

Similarly, Elliott said that he hopes that school leadership and teachers across the country, in watching the whole PBS NewsHour, see that there are “more progressive and intuitive ways to teach students.”

“People learn different ways, and what I hope comes out of both pieces of media is that it shows schools there are different ways to teach students that are a lot more beneficial than how they’re doing it now,” James said. “I think both of these things are really similar — the skateboarding and the panel that Emit did are both pretty similar in showing schools that it’s OK to try different things, because schools may benefit from that and students may learn more easily from that.”

This was something that Hamilton agreed with, noting that the PBS program offers a unique opportunity for students to share their voices.

“We need to listen to students more, and that’s what I appreciate about this reporting lab program is their whole goal is youth voice,” Hamilton said. “I hope people listen and hear what is being presented by our students; it’s so cool to have a platform for that.”

How to watch:


What: PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs presents: “Our New Normal: How teens are redefining school life”

When: Tuesday, Jan. 25 from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Register at: eventbrite.com/e/our-new-normal-how-teens-are-redefining-school-life-registration-220023725887


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