Three years ago my principal asked me to take over the
newspaper program at my school. At the
time I had been teaching yearbook for 13 years and was part-time. The option was to take the newspaper job or
retire. I debated! I loved teaching yearbook but wasn’t sure how
I was going to run two programs simultaneously.
I wanted to share the same passion and drive for each
publication. I didn’t want newspaper to
be neglected.
After much thought and many sleepless nights I decided to
take on the challenge. I presented my
principal with the idea of doing an online paper only. He loved the idea and told me to run with
it.
I felt like a deer in headlights that year. I was walking into a room full of 13
apathetic students that were mad their old teacher wasn’t returning. I knew this was the case so instead of
planning exactly what we were going to do I included the kids in every step of
the process. I told them this was their
chance to be pioneers, and truly leave their legacy.
We chose to use SNO to host our WordPress site. It was the smartest decision I made that
year. It was extremely user friendly and
if and when I got hung up on something, the SNO Patrol was only an e-mail
away. They responded quickly and got me
through my first year as a newspaper teacher.
I knew I wanted more, I wanted to build the same high
expectations I had in my yearbook classroom into my newspaper program. The difficulty I faced was managing the
volumes of individual deadlines coming in.
This past year I saw an advertisement for SNO Flow. Flow is an online, interactive management
system that allowed me to track each story element as it went through the
pipeline. There was no more finger-pointing involved. It simplified my grading process and led to a
much higher caliber publication.
Debra Klevens
Parkway West High School
Ballwin, MO
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