The Wagner Community School broadcasting class has created a YouTube News Channel called Wagner Facts. This is not the first time that WCS has had an online student news; the first was created in 2019. Tera Koupal is the teacher of the broadcasting class that is producing the student news. Tera is in charge of all the classroom work and splits any out of the classroom work with fellow teacher, Libby Renbarger.

The WCS YouTube Channel was created after Tera toured the O’Neill, NE school. The O’Neill school had something similar to a student news channel. After touring the school, Tera thought it would be a cool idea to start an online news channel at WCS. In creating this news channel, it became a great hands-on activity for her broadcasting students in order to actually understand the entire process of designing and producing a news segment. The class stays busy making flyers for events and creating the live broadcasts for the school’s live events. In the spring, there is not as much for the class to do so Tera wanted something different for her students to work on and to see different aspects of the broadcasting world so the class has been doing the news cast for the past four years.

Tera teaches two different sections of broadcasting, so one week one class records the news while the other class creates their scripts and gets prepared for the following week when it will be their turn to record. The broadcasts typically last between four and five minutes depending on what topics the students are covering. Both sections have a mix of students from freshmen to senior.

Between the two broadcasting situations, Tera has 22 students enrolled this semester. During the live events, the class works the computer, announces events, or handle the cameras. The students also made fliers to post on the WCS Facebook page. When it comes to the news segments, the students come up with different segments they want to put on air and the students rotate roles so that each student can experience different parts of the broadcasting process. Each class has a student that is the producer that puts all of the clips together and then gets the news segments ready to upload onto YouTube. The broadcasting class tries to put out a news segment once a week on their channel.

When asked what kinds of topics the students cover, Tera said that she gives them some options, but really leaves it up to the students in order to let them cover what they want or topics they were interested in. Tera’s reasoning for this is to let the students take ownership of the news channel and make it their own. Tera tries to keep the news content to solely student created content. She does however step in only when she feels that they need some guidance or assistance.

In her role as the advisor, Tera does approve the topics the students choose, the scripts, and watches the final production before uploading it to YouTube. As the advisor of the news channel, Tera wants the students to get more comfortable in front of a camera. She wants to push the students to get out of their comfort zones, and wants them to see what the behind-the-scenes look like for news or any production. In producing the channel, the biggest surprise to the students has been, “it took two class periods to create a four-minute news cast?” Each production takes so much work to create a short production. The time and work were well worth it though for the experience and seeing the final product.

The WCS YouTube news channel can be viewed on YouTube by following RedRaidersLive. Once following the channel, there will be notifications sent when new videos are posted. The WCS YouTube student news channel will continue as long as students keep enrolling in the broadcasting class.