Claremont High Reporters Win First Del Olmo Award

Two days before the Claremont High School newspaper went to press, reporters received the confirmation they had been seeking for weeks: A 23-year-old Stanford graduate had posed as a student the previous spring.

The Wolfpacket broke the story of Jeremy Iversen.

School newspaper reporter Sarah Pwol proposed the article after rumors flew in January about a local morning news program in which Iversen talked about going undercover at a high school to gather research for a book, Wolfpacket reporters said.

Students told the reporters about the classmate they knew as Jeremy Hughes, a newcomer last spring who many thought looked too old to be attending high school, and who was suspected of being a police informant. At the time, teachers and staff members assured them that wasn’t true, according to Wolfpacket reporters.

The reporters were the first to interview the superintendent who made the decision to allow Iversen on campus. Their staff editorial was published in a local newspaper. And they published a special four-page edition about Iversen in March.

The school newspaper’s January article was the first time most parents and community members had heard of the incident. The article sparked criticism of school officials for allowing Iversen to pose as a student. For the next two months, the paper stayed ahead of local media.

“With these articles, we helped remind people how important it is to keep students informed of the issues that affect them,” said Ellie Wolf, a junior who has worked on the student paper since her freshman year.

On Thursday, Claremont High editor Wolf, reporter Pwol, and three Wolfpacket editorial writers, Serena Parr, Trilokesh Kidambi and Caitlan Hinshaw, won The Times’ first Frank del Olmo Impact Award for a high school newspaper, which is given for students’ work that had an impact on their school or community.

Frank del Olmo, a reporter, editor and columnist for The Times for 33 years, died in February 2004 at the age of 55. He was a pioneer for Latino journalists and a strong supporter of student journalism.

Long Beach City College won the Impact Award, part of The Times’ student journalism awards, for a college newspaper for bringing public scrutiny in March to two incidents of censorship on campus, one involving a dean who censored segments of a student-produced TV news program and the other involving a police attempt to confiscate a student journalist’s videotape in class.