School Paper Making News--in Spanish

“What’s the word for rally? “ Brian Singer, 17, called across the makeshift newspaper office tucked in the back of a classroom at Fullerton High School.

“ Demostracion ?” he asked, talking to no one in particular on Thursday afternoon. Singer, a senior and the editor in chief of the student newspaper--Pleiades--was putting final touches to this year’s first edition, the first to include Spanish articles. “Is there an n or without an n ?” he asked again.

A couple of computers away, with a handy hardback Spanish-English dictionary at his side, junior Jeremy Eng offered the gospel: “No n ,” Eng, editor of the new Seccion Espanola said as he quickly typed in a headline. “Just with an accent.”

And, he noted, no accent mark on Independencia in another headline.

Pleiades’ Spanish page debuts today; it is the first high school newspaper in Orange County to offer a full page of Spanish news and features in each issue. It is also one of only a few dozen student publications nationwide that use languages other than English.

Editors and the paper’s adviser say they hope the new section will give advanced Spanish students a chance to practice their skills and help unite a community in which 47% of the 1,450 students are Latino and nearly a quarter are not proficient in English.

“No matter what your philosophy is, leaving politics out of it, communication is just so important,” said Barbara Clark, a Spanish and journalism teacher who advises the Pleiades staff. “If you have a message to get across, you’re going to have to use a language. If you have a large group of the population that’s Hispanic, you need Spanish.

“It’s priceless,” Clark said of the new Seccion Espanola. “They’re using Spanish in a very communicative and functional way. The goal of any Spanish program is to create a real situation. . . . Well, I’m not making it up. I have a real situation for them.”

Every word on Pagina 6 is in Spanish--except, Singer pointed out, the paper’s title, Pleiades, which is a Greek word that refers to a constellation.

The page includes a translation of the paper’s lead article, about a rally for Chicano studies classes that Fullerton College students staged last week; a story about the celebration of Mexico’s independence, and Noticias Breves, offering announcements of upcoming events, a blurb about supporting the school’s sports teams, and a short piece about the school’s centennial celebration.

Students in Spanish 5, the most advanced class at the school, will translate and write the articles for the new section, joining the six editors and 13 other journalism students who publish the 1,700-circulation newspaper each month.

Ed Sullivan, director of the New York-based Columbia Scholastic Press Assn., said only about 25 of the 2,400 student publications his organization evaluates each year include snippets of foreign languages. CSPA has offered a foreign-language competition to students since the 1930s, Sullivan said, but most entries are literary magazines or newsletters.

In recent years, however, some schools in ethnically diverse areas have begun offering Spanish sections similar to that of Fullerton’s, he said.

“If you want to say that education should be responsive to the need to be globally competitive, then we ought to be encouraging the study of more and different foreign languages and this is an excellent way to motivate kids to really study,” he said on hearing about Pleiades’ experiment.

Locally, student newspapers in Anaheim and the Capistrano Unified School District have occasionally translated some articles into Spanish or other languages, but none have had a regular feature like Seccion Espanola .

“A newspaper’s role is to communicate with people,” Fullerton High Principal Ed Shaw said, noting that the Spanish section will also help keep non-English-speaking parents in touch with goings-on at school. “We have a certain part of our population we were not communicating with. It’s hard to get students involved if they don’t know what’s going on.”

Now in its 74th year of publication, Pleiades has garnered local and national recognition, winning top honors in four of the past six years from Quill and Scroll, an international honor society for high school journalists, as well as awards from CSPA, the National Scholastic Press Assn. and The Times Orange County.

The Spanish section grew out of a newsletter published about five times last year by advanced Spanish students and distributed as an insert to Pleiades. Journalism students wanted to make the newsletter more newsy, so they decided to make it part of the paper.

“I thought it’d be kind of cool,” said Eng, who is of Chinese descent but is now enrolled in Spanish 4 and, with the help of his dictionary, is in charge of the Spanish page.

Clark--who first dabbled in journalism as Pleiades feature editor while a student at Fullerton High in the 1970s--is a natural to help turn the paper into a bilingual publication because of her expertise in Spanish and journalism.

“The first edition comes out tomorrow!” one student editor shouted excitedly as the pages were pasted up Thursday afternoon. Ever the teacher, Clark called out: “ Manana! “