Throughout a year of learning curves, laughs and late days, The Pearl Post staff has done excellent work. We are so proud of the content we produced this year and the noticeable growth each staff member has made as a student journalist. 

Our staff faced several challenges this year, but we met each one with resilience and determination. We dealt with Los Angeles Unified School District’s unprecedented and unlawful attempt to censor us and suspend our adviser with poise and confidence. We fought for student press freedom and our adviser’s suspension was rescinded. Throughout our fight, we continued to do important reporting for our school and community.

Despite our staff of 14 being split into two periods, we accomplished our goal of extensively using the app Slack to keep updated about the status of stories and to send reminders to staff members about deadlines. We also benefited from the app Trello, which allowed us to organize all story ideas into categories based on where it is in the editing process. 

When we started the 2022-23 school year, our main goal for the newsmagazine was to publish at least four print issues. We are proud that we surpassed this goal, publishing a total of five issues, including the first special issue in The Pearl Post history. Another goal we had was to incorporate more photos, artwork and infographics. We fully achieved this goal, including eye-catching and informative visual content on every page.

We also wanted to carry over last year’s momentum of consistently publishing articles on the website. Throughout the current school year, that goal was met by typically publishing four out of the five days in the school week. We are also proud of the variety of videos produced throughout the year, from light-hearted videos like the Water Fountain Roulette to the news video covering the Service Employees International Union Local 99 strike in March. 

The Room 22 podcast also stayed strong in its second year with six episodes that discussed many areas of student life. We are also proud of the many photo slideshows we published on the website this year. In total, we published over 20 slideshows from school events such as the World Music Day and Pearl Con. 

This spring, several staff members attended the National High School Journalism Convention (NHSJC) in San Francisco. At NHSJC, The Pearl Post won several awards, including eighth place in Best of Show for small school newsmagazine. The staff has also won several local, state and national awards throughout the year. We earned second place in online and third place in print in the California All Stars contest. We were also recently named finalists in both web and print in the L.A. Press Club’s 65th Annual Southern California Journalism Awards.

This year has proven to be a rollercoaster of setbacks, triumphs, stress, accomplishments and perseverance. It was an honor to lead The Pearl Post through it all. We are immensely grateful to this staff and are confident that our student-run publications will continue their stellar work in future years.