Narbonne ‘Coach’ Turns Student News Staff Into Award-Winning Team

For students in Nathaniel Narbonne High School’s journalism program, writing is like a team sport, complete with grueling after-school practice, a demanding coach and squads of cheerleaders at competitions.

The years of hard work building a franchise of solid writers is paying off, to the delight of “Coach” Alison Rittger and the 30 students who publish “The Green and Gold” weekly.

Last Saturday, the school in Harbor City, which is part of the Los Angeles Unified School District, took first place at the National Assn. of Journalism Directors Annual Team Sweepstakes Championship for Southern California. Narbonne students who won awards received cheers from their colleagues in the audience, who blew party noise-makers when the winners’ names were called.

Rittger, who asks the athletic coaches at Narbonne to treat her as a fellow coach, calls journalism “a great game.”

“I think I’m a pretty hard taskmaster,” Rittger said in an interview this week at the school. “I’ve been building the program year after year. We have a tiny room to work in but the enthusiasm level is high.”

‘Lean and Mean’ Writing

As preparation for journalism competitions, students stay late after school, practicing hard to perfect writing Rittger describes as “lean and mean.” On top of the pressures of competition, they cope with the real-life deadlines of putting out the South Bay’s only weekly high school newspaper.

In Rittger’s six years at Narbonne as an English teacher and journalism adviser, she has guided the paper’s growth from a monthly one-page news sheet to its present 34 issues a year. It has a run of 2,500 papers printed each week during the school year--except during finals and holidays. The paper has an annual budget of about $8,000.

Students do their own writing, editing and layout, and sell about $3,500 worth of advertising a year, Rittger said.

The paper’s editors and writers are all Rittger’s recruits. They come from a cross section of 10th-grade English classes at the school, she said. The 30 students on the staff all have taken her 10th-grade journalism class.

“I sort of went around and fingered them and said, ‘This is where you belong; you’ll be happy here,’ ” Rittger said. “Some of them are not so outstanding in English; some of them are just different. Writing is like a trade you can teach them.”

The experience has been a happy one for senior Steve Speciale, 18, a Rittger recruit who is the paper’s features editor.

“I was going to be a jock, running track,” Speciale said. But shortly after joining the paper, he gave up running for writing.

“All during school, except in first and fourth grades, my teachers told me I was a bad writer,” Speciale said. “I had Miss Rittger in 10th grade, and she was the first teacher who told me I wasn’t a bad writer.”

Speciale and his colleagues spend their afternoons writing in the newsroom of Building B at Narbonne, amid computers, a dozen journalism trophies and signs cautioning students about inaccuracy and missed deadlines.

A Feisty Focus

The paper has a feisty, hard-news focus that has not been without controversy, said news editor Cindy Price, an 18-year-old senior. Story topics have included the homeless, students who work at minimum-wage jobs, year-round schools and the effect of amnesty for immigrants on some Narbonne students.

In November, angry students stormed the newsroom, complaining about Price’s story on this year’s homecoming election. Only students who had registered were allowed to vote, and Price quoted complaints by some defeated candidates that the homecoming election was a “revenge of the nerds,” a description that upset some students and faculty.

But Rittger stood by her reporter’s story.

“A lot of teachers were angry with me,” Rittger said. “They said we were too professional, too negative. But it makes no sense to train kids to do a slipshod job just because they’re in high school.”

This week, the paper’s editors chose their successors for next year. Kristina Sauerwein, 16, who was selected to be editor, credits Rittger with the program’s success.

“She’s a good teacher and she’s also very blunt,” Sauerwein said. “If you turn in something that’s not good, she’ll tear it up,” but only after explaining to the students why the story was not up to par.

Some graduates of the program are now studying journalism at places like USC, Stanford, Northwestern and El Camino Community College, Rittger said.

One Narbonne graduate, Danny Bowker, 21, has worked as an editor on the staff of USC’s Daily Trojan and sometimes assists Rittger at workshops and chaperones trips to competitions. “My fondest memories of Narbonne are of that little back room,” he said Wednesday during an editing session in the classroom.

Not all of the students plan on journalism careers. Editor Jamie Dunham, 17, plans to attend the University of California, Berkeley, concentrating on science, her strongest academic subject, but hopes to continue writing, she said.

But journalism is “not a bad alternative,” she said.