Just by creating our newsletter, we can work together, and using the power of the press, we can change the community.  -Myself, 2013

Introduction

For years now, our middle school has unjustly had a dark haze around it, and been a place that some people even fear.  I know this because when I moved to Alexandria, I saw the school, and heard horrible stories about it.  I was terrified of the school on my first day of 6th grade, and it was for no reason, as it turned out, because there is a great staff, the students are all friendly for the most part, and the assignments are generally fun and exciting, rather than the long sheets of homework that we all don’t miss.  In other words, I love the school I go to, yet on the first day, what I had heard before of the school had been very frightening.  Today, and for the next few weeks or months, our team will be working towards a grant to raise money for our new project that we came up with: The Prexie Press.  This is the name of our newsletter we wish to create; we will write articles on the new events at GW 1 and 2, and will attempt to use these articles to turn around the unflattering opinions of our school within our community.  I believe that if we can write this newsletter and format it in favor of our school, we can eliminate the negative opinions of the people around us.

Our group consists of three people:

• Eric Tideman
• Lesly Quintinilla
• Nick Rodrigues (that’s me!)

Together, we will write a newsletter, and use the power of the press to filter out the prejudices that have surrounded GW for far too long.  Though we are GW2 students, we will also make our newsletter appealing to the GW1 wing of our school, and overall have a campus news rather than a biase towards one of the schools.

Skills We Have Acquired

Through our searching for a grant to fuel our funding, we [our group] have discovered that we can work together with Google Drive and Google Groups in order to collaborate and work together in emails, and can use these to send emails and do other things that are necessary for our project, without using tools we do not want to share, such as personal e-mail login information.  Also, we’ve discovered that we can all be listening for “hot topics” all around our school, which we can use to write about.  We can even listen to the news outside of our school, and discuss it with each other.

Setbacks

However, as we moved on with our project, we noticed some key setbacks within our plans for finding a grant.  Our biggest problem is that no matter how hard we search, none of the people in our group have found so much as a single grant, and we haven’t even found a trace of one.  Also, Google Drive is not a perfect application, as I have witnessed it crash several times a use.  One more problem would be that none of us really want to deal with sending people emails from our own personal emails.  Finally, one of the biggest problems with having a newspaper is the commitment.  Though it is good to practice this, as a job can require a massive commitment, we’ve never taken on a challenge of this form or caliber, and I can’t be sure that my group members are very familiar with weekly commitments.  However, I’m already certain that we can get through these problems, and get our newspaper up and running for a few months, and even the rest of the year, if we can.  Commitments aren’t a big deal.  We’re 7th graders.  That’s exactly halfway through schooling.  We can take it.

 Solutions

As we stated about our setbacks, this definitely won’t be cakewalk.  However, we have some solutions to deal with our problems.

First off, we have a solution to our trouble finding a grant.  We were recently able to find a list of phone numbers and emails from the Washington Post, which we could use to ask the different staff members of the Washington Post about local grants for newspapers and newsletters.

Second, I was able to find out the main bug in Google Drive that causes it to crash.  If you have an image in the document you create, and have too many people messing with the picture, or just the picture being too moved around in a small period of time (as in, 3 seconds), it will crash the document.  Knowing what causes this bug, we can avoid it now, and Google Drive will be  a much more reliable program for us.

Finally, we reached two more walls in our project: commitment.  I understand that people have things to do and that they aren’t always in the mood for searching grants and writing news articles.  However, it may not be a problem now, but if we don’t work something out to solve this problem, our project is doomed from the start.  Another issue with commitment is emails.  Once again, I can understand why the members of my group wouldn’t want to be contacting people they don’t know with their personal emails.  Similarly, my group members aren’t exactly excited to call people with their own home and cell phones.  Honestly, I don’t want to share those things either.  However, we will need to send emails and call people occasionally to people other than fellow friends, students and teachers, and we need to think of a solution to let us contact these people without sharing personal emails and phone numbers.  I came up with the solution of creating  a group email, and we can email people from that.  However, we still run into the problem we also have: how will we call people?  I believe that we won’t have to call people if we just use email, but just in case, I think we would need to work out a solution with Ms. Chintha.

Progress

We still don’t have any official decision on what to do next, but it looks to me like our next steps are simply to contact some people within the staff of the Washington Post and see if any data we can collect will lead us to find a grant for newspapers.  After that, we will write a grant, find out what companies are offering to publish independent newspapers and newsletters, and then start creating our newsletter.  I was thinking about the layout, and I believe tabloid size would be big enough.  I have chosen those steps because they just seem like what we need to do, because our current concerns are finding a grant, and then using the grant to start our newsletter.  If we work it out with the teachers and staff at GW, I doubt there are any concerns in distribution methods.  If we don’t get any support from the staff, however, we can always just slip it into the slits of individual lockers on early mornings (though the newspaper will be weekly or monthly).  I really believe that if we follow these steps, we can write our newspaper, and clear up the unjust reputation that our school has.

I think that the most fun we’ve had with our project is scripting the emails we will soon send.  We work throughout class from bell to bell and get a lot done for the email scripts.  Also, we will be coordinating with each other through the chat bar that you can use simultaneously with the document in Google Drive, and there is something strangely entertaining about doing such.

Though we haven’t had too much luck searching for a grant so far, I know that we can pull it off.  We can succeed in our project.  All we need is a little help from the newspaper crews around us.