Young at heart

Fun issue this week. It’s my second “teen” issue. Everything is either written by a teen, is about teens or is of general interest to teens. Last year, only the cover story was written by teenagers. This year, probably 85 percent of the issue was written by teenagers. Next year, assuming I haven’t been hit by a bus—well, we’ll see, I see some columnists in our pages who haven’t been teenagers since before their teenagers were born. If one of you high school journalists has an interest in editing an entire issue of the RN&R, give me a call.

At any rate, there’s a lot of work that goes into these kinds of things. For my part, I’d like to thank three people in particular: Stephen Tchudi and Jimmy Guignard of Rainshadow Community Charter High School and Alyssa Boisson, our high school intern. I’d also like to thank all our teen contributors.

Stephen and Jimmy coordinated the first component of this issue, helping students from Rainshadow to come up with story ideas, interview subjects and put their stories into “news” style. The issue wouldn’t have happened without their assistance.

Alyssa is a junior at Galena High School. She wrangled the writers in the back part of the paper, assembled the round table participants for the cover story, came up with the questions and wrote the story. I’m very impressed with Alyssa, and I predict she’ll join the ranks of RN&R interns who’ve gone on to great careers.

Alyssa would also like to pass along her thanks to all the people who helped her, primarily the principals, counselors and teachers who recommended students for the roundtable.

Reason to vote No. 22: There are those who can’t vote because they’re too young. Without your good example, why would they vote when they are old enough?