SANTA ANA : Youths on Track for News Career

Alongside professional print and broadcast reporters and photographers from as far away as Japan, a television news team of Spurgeon Intermediate School students rolled cameras and conducted its own interview with an international race car driver.

As members of the school’s Kid Witness News team, the seven students have been learning how to interview and to direct, produce, film and edit their own newscasts since February.

And on Wednesday, they got a chance to practice their skills during a press conference with Japanese Indy car racer Hiro Matsushita, who will compete in the Long Beach Grand Prix on Sunday.

The students joined professional journalists at the press conference, held in Cypress by one of Matsushita’s corporate sponsors.

Seated in chairs in front of a blue and yellow race car, reporter Chris Gutierrez, 13, and Matsushita waited as the video camera whirred to life.

After a brief introduction, Chris launched into his first question: “How do you think you’re going to do in the race this weekend?”

The five-minute interview covered whether the racer’s recently broken leg was sufficiently healed for the race, and what words of encouragement the driver had for children.

Afterward, Matsushita praised Chris and his crew.

“They did a very good job. They were almost better than professional interviewers. Chris told me he was very nervous before the interview, but he did very well,” the race car driver said.

Teacher Deborah Storey said that a few weeks ago, the students completed their first video project, a commercial on teen violence and alternatives to gangs, which included an interview with Santa Ana’s chief of police, Paul M. Walters.

As the team becomes more experienced, the program may expand next year to include a video yearbook for the school.

Coral Balderrama, 12, said she now wants to be a broadcast reporter when she is older, because “it’s exciting.” She added that she is still a little shy when on camera.

“It’s kind of hard to be a reporter because (sometimes) you get messed up when you’re talking.”

Storey said the program, developed for schools nationwide by an electronics company that also donated the video equipment, has become a powerful teaching tool in a school with predominantly underprivileged students, many of whom have seldom been outside Santa Ana.

“They don’t know what the rest of the world is like,” she said, but added that through video field trips like this one, “they see the rest of the world going on.”

The Spurgeon program includes 15 students, and most of them have become more interested in other subjects at school since they joined, she said.

“I’ve seen kids go from Cs to A’s and Bs. They’ve learned that to do a professional job, they have to do it over and over again, and that the best results come with practice.”

However, camera operator Edgar Alvarado, 14, said there is another reason his grades have improved: “If you don’t have good grades, you get kicked out, and I don’t want to get kicked out.”