The Paw Print

by Bridget Galibois, Editor-in-Chief

As we ring in the 2023-2024 school year, the Payton Paw Print is committed to continue covering the news that matters to the entire Payton community. Globally, the media landscape is rapidly changing, a trend exacerbated by the shuttering of small newsrooms due the pandemic; at Payton, years of remote learning and debates about school policy and funding have threatened our ability to continue publishing. However, in the midst of uncertainty, the power of student news organizations remains constant— and necessary.

Over the past year, student journalists have made national headlines. After an on-campus shooting at UNC Chapel Hill, the Daily Tar Heel was nationally recognized for their front page, which displayed frantic texts from friends and family during the lockdown. The Daily Northwestern published important details relating to allegations of racism, hazing, and misconduct within the school’s football program. The Harvard Crimson exposed a $30,000 transfer of funds from the school’s Undergraduate Foreign Policy Initiative to a student’s private bank account.

There was inherent risk in publishing each of these pieces, which put the authors’ personal safety on the line and dealt a blow to their schools’ reputations as elite institutions; but more importantly, these writers wanted to be in control of the stories because the news came from their schools and it was their responsibility as journalists to share the truth.

For the past 20 years, Payton students have upheld this responsibility. Going back to October 2018, student journalists at the Paw Print provided insight into the removal of two teachers amidst allegations of inappropriate conduct during the previous spring semester. The coverage included interviews with Payton’s former principal, as well as student and teacher perspectives that were not being covered anywhere else. Today, notices about appropriate behavior and respectful boundaries are displayed on most classroom doors— and these changes happened CPS-wide, in response to local journalism coverage.

There have been tremendous changes in administration following this incident and the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Paw Print has covered the departure of two principals during 2020 and 2021 respectively. With up-to-date articles and graphics about town halls and community forums during Payton’s search for a new principal, we strove to keep everyone in our community informed in a quickly changing landscape.

The pandemic has also impacted the rate of teacher turnover at Payton, much as it has affected turnover at other schools and, indeed, across many industries. Some estimate that more than 50% of our teachers from the 2019-2020 school year have since left. While Paw Print interviews with incoming teachers through our annual “Meet the New Teachers” profiles are an award-winning back-to-school feature, the 2022-2023 school year marked the first time that we featured more than 20 teachers in the series.

Another notable change is the absence of a newspaper class, formerly a staple at Payton. At the start of the 2020-2021 school year, the more than 90 students who had registered to take Honors Journalism: Newspaper and Honors Journalism: Broadcast were assigned to a new class: 21st Century Multimedia Literature. While the new class gave a brief overview of the state of journalism in a digital world, it did not provide the funds that had previously been allocated to the Paw Print or the weekly broadcast, Payton News Network. Furthemore, during the 2021-2022 school year, even the 21st Century Multimedia Literature class was discontinued, leaving Payton entirely without a news media-focused journalism class.

It has been a tumultuous few years for journalism, to say the least. We don’t know what will come next, but that is why we are here to write about what our community needs to hear. As newsrooms continue to shrink and funding continues to be tight, we are here to be the beacon you can rely on for in-depth analysis of global issues and school events.

We will continue to write the first drafts of history. As the news landscape evolves, our door remains open, and there are no plans to close it anytime soon.