NYC elected officials push for student newspapers at every high school

Elected officials are pressuring the Department of Education to fund student newspapers at every public high school in New York City.

The resolution , introduced in April, argues that school newspapers provide students with a platform to express their ideas and creativity while also helping to develop critical thinking skills. It is set to be discussed during the Council’s education committee meeting on Thursday.

The resolution cites data from a November 2022 report by Baruch College at CUNY. The report found that high schools with high four-year graduation rates are more likely to have student newspapers compared to those with the lowest rates.

“Young people can tell their stories,” Brooklyn City Councilmember Rita Joseph, who drafted the resolution, said during an interview with Gothamist on Tuesday. “We always say: They are their voices. So it’s time that we let them use their voices to tell the stories that matter to them.”

The report found that only a fraction of public high schools serving low-income students or students of color had student newspapers, despite advocates' belief that these programs help create a more racially and socioeconomically diverse pool of future reporters.

Only 7% of 100 non-charter public high schools with the highest poverty rates had student newspapers, while schools with high percentages of Black and Hispanic students were less likely to have a campus publication, according to the Baruch College report .

Katina Paron, who is working at CUNY to develop a high school journalism elective program that will be free for public high school students starting fall 2025, called the resolution 'a good step forward' for equitable journalism opportunities.

“Young people deserve to have a seat at the table of issues that affect them, and high school journalism – scholastic journalism – is a step towards that,” Paron, who is the Curriculum Lead at Journalism For All, said. “To help people learn and see how they can use their voice to be heard and supported in a school environment.”

City DOE spokesperson Nathaniel Styer said the department appreciated lawmakers' advocacy.

"We’ve invested over $1.5 billion in schools, which goes a long way towards providing enriching opportunities for our students, like student newspapers, and we recently had organizations that support student newspapers present to superintendents on how to best support student newspapers," Styer said in an emailed statement, adding, "We look forward to continuing this work to support our student newspapers."

The resolution follows a demonstration in April by groups of students from the NYC Youth Journalism Coalition, who gathered on the steps of City Hall to call for more student journalism opportunities in the nation’s largest school district.

Last month, The City reported that a mayoral fund established to support student journalists of color went months without an executive director and has not disclosed how much it has raised for aspiring journalists.

This story has been updated with comment from the city Department of Education.