A Chance to Succeed
Journalism Program Teaches Nuts and Bolts of Business, Creates Unique Student Resource
by Chiara Coletti
Teenagers nationwide are finding a valuable resource in publications written by NYC public high school students. The articles that chronicle students’ challenges and triumphs are written for the magazine New Youth Connections – recently renamed YCteen. The stories have also been anthologized in books used by middle and high school teachers thousands of miles from the buzzing Youth Communication newsroom on West 29th Street.
The magazine has been popular in NYC’s secondary school classrooms since 1980 and Youth Communication, the magazine’s parent organization, has been turning the work into books with teachers’ guides since 1997. Some 486 public high schools currently order YCteen.
“We always distributed the magazine in Advisory,” says Janet Price, former Principal of Brooklyn Preparatory and now a Principal-Trainer at New Visions. “If the teachers were looking for a great Advisory topic, they found it in the magazine.”
In 2011, the Association of Education Publishers (AEP) named YCteen Periodical of the Year for its straightforward, solutions-based coverage of hot issues. “The AEP award is like our industry Oscar,” says Publisher Keith Hefner. Shaped by ’60s and ’70s idealism, Mr. Hefner won a MacArthur “genius” award for his publishing efforts 21 years ago.
Many of these student stories have a long shelf life in anthologies like American Me about the teen immigrant experience, and Real Men, with true stories by young men and boys of color on how to deal with staggering challenges. Real Men also won the 2011 AEP award for the best high school character education curriculum.
Student writers include Julieta Velasquez, a senior at the High School for Construction Trades, Engineering and Architecture in Queens and Breanna King, a senior at City-As-School. Julieta just interviewed Filipino Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas for an immigration story.
Otis Hampton, a Canarsie graduate, found his way to YC through Represent, YC’s 18-yearold magazine for foster care youth. “I had nothing to do after school,” Otis says, “so my social worker told me to check out Represent.” He’s now a student at Kingsborough Community College and continues to write “edgy stories” for the magazine.
Principal Eric Strauss from Manhattan’s High School of Art and Design appreciates the stories in Represent: “I’ve adopted three foster kids, so that kind of material is very interesting to me. The fact that they’re writing is a great thing and helps other children develop an awareness of what it’s like to conquer disadvantages.”
Mr. Hefner opened the doors of Youth Communication in the basement of All Angels Church on the Upper West Side in 1979. His dreams of starting a youth magazine flowed from his experience when he was a student editor at Ann Arbor Pioneer High School in 1972. At the time, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards program invited him to a conference on student journalism in Washington DC. That conference gave rise to a national Commission of Inquiry into High School Journalism, with a Chicago inner city Catholic school teacher, Sister Ann Heintz, as its muse.
The Commission’s report identified a need for the high school press to investigate stories that adult media overlooked; to provide adolescent readers with a realistic reflection of their lives, and to train a racially diverse corps of journalists.
Sr. Ann founded a citywide magazine in Chicago in 1977 and Mr. Hefner brought her idea to New York. In May 1980, he published a trial issue of New Youth Connections. After the first school deliveries, he circled back through boroughs to make sure the bundles hadn’t turned into litter. “They were all gone,” he remembers. “That was our signal that this
was really needed.”
Principals suggested that he take orders through Coordinators of Student Activities (COSAs). By September 1981, COSAs had ordered 100,000 copies of the magazine and he never looked back. Today, The New York Times donates the printing.
Many YC interns have become professional writers. Edwidge Danticat was a Haitian immigrant when she entered Clara Barton High School and found her way to YC; today she is a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Mohamad Bazzi, who attended Bronx Science, was Newsday’s Middle East Bureau Chief. Veronica Chambers, a graduate of Fashion Industries High School, is an editor at Hearst and the author of 11 books.
Several former interns are Principals, including Grismaldy Laboy-Wilson, who graduated from Adlai Stevenson in the Bronx, and went back as a teacher after graduating from Brown University. She became the youngest high school Principal in the history of the system when, at 25, she founded Gautier High School for Law and Public Policy.
“Through my internship, I finally had a venue where I could express my social justice concerns and the things I saw in my community.… It motivated me to be a success,” she says. A story she wrote as a teen, about the unsolved killing of a beloved cousin, was later published in the YC anthology Things Get Hectic, about coping with urban violence. The book is used in her school today.
Of the magazine, she says, “It’s a valuable resource to achieve curricular goals aligned to the Common Core Learning Standards. … And the stories let the kids know you do have a voice and you do have power. You can change things.”
Chiara Coletti is the Director of Communications at CSA. She is a proud member of the Board of Directors at Youth Communication, which runs this writing program.
