Budget Cuts and Apathy Help Fold Newspapers at Many High Schools

After six decades of reporting on student life at Hamilton High School in West Los Angeles, The Federalist quietly died this fall.

The demise of the school newspaper was not unexpected. Once a weekly newspaper, The Federalist had labored against a variety of obstacles over the last decade and was published only five times in its final year.

“We’ve gone the way of the (Los Angeles) Herald Examiner,” said George Hedges, journalism adviser for 17 years. “Not enough students were interested. We came out so infrequently that by the time we got the newspapers out, the news was so old and stale nobody cared. And we were always in the red.”

Increasingly, high school newspapers in urban school districts from Los Angeles to New York are facing the same kinds of problems. Once the chroniclers of prep football games, homecoming parades and senior proms, they are succumbing to student apathy, declining writing skills and minuscule budgets.

A generation ago, nearly every Los Angeles-area high school produced a weekly newspaper. Now only a handful of weeklies survive among the 49 high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. In New York City, most high school “newspapers” are actually quarterly newsletters.

“The hurdles get higher and higher,” said Alison Rittger, president of the Southern California Journalism Educators Assn. “And if you lost your paper, the chances are your school wouldn’t care,” said the journalism adviser at Narbonne High School in Harbor City.

At Hamilton High School, for example, Hedges said a final affront was a 20% cut in the Federalist’s $2,500 budget. Even worse, only two students had signed up to work on this year’s newspaper.

It was all a far cry from Hedges’ first days as adviser in the 1970s.

“We used to come out every two weeks,” he said. “Then it became a monthly. Then it came out every two months, then every three months.”

Many of the urban school papers that have survived publish only intermittently and continue to shrink; photocopied, letter-sized sheets have replaced the once-standard broad sheet at several schools. Photo layouts have all but disappeared.

As a result, the best writers are shying away from journalism classes.

“Quite frankly, there’s a lack of interest on the part of the students,” said Linda Puntney, executive secretary of the Kansas-based National Journalism Education Assn. “We’re not nearly the reading society we used to be.

“The other big factor is the financial crunch in education programs,” Puntney continued. “And with a soft economy, it’s going to be hard for papers to sell advertising. I can see the situation worsening. It’s pretty frightening.”

Still, high school publications seem to be flourishing in most middle-class and suburban communities.

“It seems today that the suburban schools are the ones that are shining,” said Tom Rolnicki, executive director of the National Scholastic Press Assn.

Redondo Union High School is among the more fortunate schools, for example. Its paper, the High Tide, publishes eight pages every two weeks on four Macintosh computers and a laser printer, and is funded by a $1,000 grant from the student activities budget plus advertising sales, said adviser Mitch Ziegler.

Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, however, is struggling to print a monthly newsletter. In the 1930s and ‘40s, the school published a daily newspaper.

Journalism teacher Tom Liebengood works against a daunting set of obstacles to guide 17 students in the production of The Manual Press.

Writers are hard to find at the South-Central Los Angeles high school, where students’ reading scores ranked among the lowest in the state, Liebengood said. And like many student publications, The Manual Press does not have a typewriter; students must line up to borrow a single computer in the graphic arts class.

Year-round schedules in some Los Angeles schools mean the entire newspaper staff is missing for months at a time. At Belmont High School, the staff was on vacation for the homecoming football game and the senior prom.

With an irregular publishing schedule, Belmont journalism adviser Dentler Erdman said he has trouble persuading his students to meet deadlines.

Los Angeles school district officials acknowledge that some school newspapers have faced difficulties in recent years.

“I am aware that some schools do not have publications, for a variety of reasons,” said Richard Browning, director of administrative support services for senior high schools. “It’s not uncommon that you can’t find anyone to be the adviser. Another problem is that it’s expensive.”

At most Los Angeles high schools, newspapers are paid for with student body funds, controlled in part by the student government and used for a variety of school activities.

“Schools don’t have money to fund all the activities they want,” Browning said. “If the basketball team wants new uniforms, if you need new choir robes, are you going to buy those things or put out a newspaper?”

In some school districts, journalism classes no longer count toward admission to the University of California system.

Teachers in California and other states also complain that some school counselors have transformed journalism classes into “dumping grounds,” where they can enroll students who fail to qualify for more advanced and rigorous courses.

“Under the ideal system in the old days, the school newspapers were one of the most desirable things to work on in the school,” said Keith Hefner, publisher of New Youth Connections, a student-produced newspaper in New York City. “(Students) put it on their college applications. That’s not true anymore.”

With the decline of newspapers at inner-city schools, several independent publications such as LA Youth and New Youth Connections have stepped in to fill the void.

After learning that Lincoln Park High School in northern Chicago had not published a newspaper in years, 17-year-old Sarah Karp joined New Expressions, an independent Chicago monthly.

Karp and a group of students have plans to revive Lincoln Park’s school newspaper. She dreams of creating a publication that will take a critical look at a recently approved plan to restructure Chicago public schools.

At inner-city schools where they still publish regularly, many young writers are trying to revolutionize student journalism, using their newspapers to critically examine campus life. They report on the disappearance of driver training and other programs and feature interviews with the student victims of drive-by shootings.

Last year the staff at Pioneer High School in Whittier published four pages on homosexuality and homophobia.

When rumors began circulating about the firing of a track and field coach at Narbonne High School, reporter Luis Orona dogged school administrators two weeks until he got confirmation of the story. The Green & Gold, a weekly newspaper considered among the best in Los Angeles, has won many journalism awards.

According to several journalism teachers in Southern California and elsewhere, censorship has become a problem at some schools.

Concerned that newspapers will cast their schools in a negative light, some principals have attempted to censor articles about such problems as gang violence, grimy bathrooms and teen pregnancy, the journalism teachers said.

“There are principals in this district who reserve the right of veto, which is totally against (Los Angeles school) board policy,” said one journalism adviser who asked not to be identified. “But they don’t feel what they have done should be held up to scrutiny.”

Browning, of the Los Angeles school district, said he believes most principals follow district policies protecting the editorial freedom of student publications. He said he knew of no instances in which a principal censored a newspaper.

School district officials and journalism teachers in Los Angeles and elsewhere point out that not all the news about high school papers is bad.

“If anything, I think journalism at many schools is getting stronger,” said Jennie Bashara, president of the San Diego Journalism Education Assn. and adviser at Montgomery High School near the Mexican border. “The quality of the writing and reporting is improving.”

Three years ago, Montgomery High, where 65% of the students are Latino, started a second, Spanish-language newspaper.

Elsewhere, some schools have begun reviving their publications. Inglewood High School re-established its newspaper this year after an absence of several years.

At Locke High School in South Los Angeles, the newspaper had been dead so long that no one could remember the exact name, said newly appointed journalism adviser Suzanne Mustacich.

Eventually, a teacher retrieved a back issue of the Saints’ Courier and the resurrected newspaper published its first issue this fall.

The student editor of the Saints’ Courier, Tiffany Dirks, speaks with passion about the newspaper’s duty to keep Locke High informed.

“I want to change something here,” she continued. “I want the students to be able to know what’s going on.”

Times staff writers John D. Cramer, Shawn Hubler and Marc Lacey contributed to this story.