By Jessica Easthope
Luciano Amoroso, a fourth grader at St. Luke’s School in Whitestone, delivers the weather report to his classmates daily. It’s how they know whether or not recess will be outside.
“I watch the news every morning,” Amoroso said. “I get out of bed, I go on the couch, get the remote, and I hear the weather, the traffic, everything you need to know.”
Recently, Amoroso and around 20 other students explored their journalistic talents in a more official capacity by publishing articles, illustrations, and photos in their school newspaper.
The Saint Luke’s School Times newspaper is back up and running for the first time since COVID, and Principal Jan Brunswick said the students couldn’t be more passionate about the project.
“I sent out an interest form and was overwhelmed and thought we can put out multiple issues a year and give everyone a turn and have students play different roles,” Brunswick said.
The newspaper has a little bit of everything: sports, pieces on parish life, popular culture, and current events. The students come up with the ideas themselves, gather their elements, and, like professional journalists, they’re their own worst critics.
“I wrote about parish life and the choir,” Amoroso said. “There are some things I wish I would have included in there, but I didn’t. A little disappointed, but I feel like I wrote enough. I did a good one-page.”
Others find the paper, which comes out once a trimester, quite impressive.
“It was just fascinating seeing some of the kids in second and third grade, like I said, ‘You’re going to do it on a Google doc?” said Anthony Rau, a teacher at St. Luke’s and the paper’s moderator. You’re going to email it to me.’ And they did without their parents, and they just kind of looked at what they wrote.”
Rau said the students are learning how important it is to have an unbiased source of information and make their voices heard.
“If it’s important to you, it’s news, basically, and that’s kind of what I think we’re focusing on [with] them because they are so little and having them have that freedom to look at, you know, well, this is what really happened,” Rau said.
Through the Elizabeth Ann Seton Grant, the school has been able to outsource the formatting and printing of the paper. The grant even paid for a new camera to take pictures.
The next edition of the St. Luke School Times is set to hit classrooms around Memorial Day, just in time for the May crowning.