Middle school newspaper merges with PAHS Publications website

Emma Walinsky, Editor-in-Chief|March 14, 2018

Max Kelly

DISCOVER – While looking at different stories on Tide Lines Online, sophomore Kenneth Glore reads a story about the middle school band concert on the new Lengel Lingo tab. Students at the D.H.H. Lengel Middle School write stories and conduct interviews for the middle school publication, Lengel Lingo, that are then published on Tide Lines Online. “I really enjoy being able to read younger students’ work. I believe it helps them learn and gives them good experience in the field of journalism. It’s enjoyable to see aspiring journalists as well, and [this experience] may lead them to job opportunities in the future,” Glore said.

The PAHS website, www.pahstidelines.com, was previously exclusive to Tide Lines publications members from the high school. Since the beginning of this school year, members of Lengel Lingo at the D.H.H. Lengel Middle School have also been publishing stories and blogs to the online news website.

At the start of the school year, the Lengel Lingo program was appointed a new leader. Mrs. Katelynn Miller, a 6th grade English and Language Arts teacher at the middle school, took over the publication. Mrs. Miller looked for advice from high school publications advisers, Miss Bridget Freiler and Mr. Stephen Horvath, and that is where the idea to combine both levels of publications sprouted.

“I feel a strong necessity to make sure that we are doing the high schoolers and their work proud. Obviously a middle school version and a high school version are going to look very different, but I still want things to look clean, be edited properly and attract readers,” Mrs. Miller said.

Lengel Lingo has its own specific section on the website. It can be found at the top of the Tide Lines page, located just below the website’s logo. There are three primary topics that the middle school staffers write about: student spotlights, teacher tales and “Messages from Maley,” which will include informative messages on school events from Mr. Michael Maley, middle school principal. Their section covers a wide variety of students and topics. Before stories are published, they are reviewed by Mrs. Miller for grammatical errors and content revisions.

“Editing is a big issue in middle school. My staff is very young, mostly 5th and 6th graders, so I am pretty much on my own with editing. Many of their grammar skills aren’t yet fully developed at this age. I would like to recruit more older students to help with this, but also just to join the staff in general,” Mrs. Miller said.

The primary objective of integrating the middle school program with the high school publications department is that it provides a connection from middle school level journalism to writing and designing at the high school level. By establishing this connection, middle school students will already know what is expected at the high school level and what their jobs will be like and entail. They will be pre-exposed to methods of interviewing, writing and time management. It is also meant to increase the number of viewers the website gets since it will attract multiple levels of readers.