Carlsbad High School has an ambitious broadcast journalism program that not only teaches students media skills but also allows for enriching adventures outside the classroom.
Kotlik, Alaska
Last September, Carlsbad High School junior Tava Valenti traveled to the small Alaskan town of Kotlik, located on the Yukon River. While there, she had the opportunity to go out on a boat in search of seals.
"I was really surprised that this was even an option because I've never heard of any school doing this before, sending kids to this rural town in Alaska," Valenti said. "I was thinking that I was going to expand my understanding of Alaska and the terrain. But what it did was expand my understanding of the people. I made it a point where I really wanted to go on this boat, because in Kotlik, they do most of their hunting from boats. I saw these families who were really concentrated and really focused because they had to hunt something that day. They had to catch something because that's how they provide for their families."
Three other students accompanied Valenti on the trip, along with chaperone Doug Green, who retired from teaching broadcast journalism at Carlsbad High in June 2023.
"I didn't really retire, but rather 'redirected' by finding opportunities for students from Carlsbad's broadcasting classes to leave the 'Carlsbad bubble' and travel to other parts of the world to work with culturally diverse and often disadvantaged young people," Green explained.
Leaving their comfort zone
Encouraging students to leave their comfort zones has been Green's mission since before his tenure in broadcast journalism. While teaching language arts, he sought to bring "The Diary of Anne Frank" and the Holocaust to life for his eighth graders.
"I had the opportunity in 2009 to take 16 students, who volunteered, to Munich. We began producing what we thought was gonna be a very short film during spring break on the Holocaust," Green said. "It quickly gained some steam on YouTube. We were funded by the Leichtag Family Foundation to go back and and actually make a film. It's a story of 16 kind of regular high school students making a movie about something they did not understand themselves. So you sort of see this evolution of understanding as we went out and produced this film. Four trips to Europe filming and multiple concentration camps, interviewing survivors here in San Diego. Definitely life-changing for those students."
Green also started a program that brought Carlsbad High students to Wales.
"This summer will be our third trip to Wales to run a film and broadcasting camp for Welsh teens," Green said. "Our model is that we travel — we pay all of our travel expenses — to Wales to get local kids excited about filmmaking, and then we bring some of those students back to Carlsbad in the winter for a visit and trip to the Student Television Convention. We do this in association with BBC Wales and Cardiff University."
Senior Maddie Mulligan found peer teaching at the camp rewarding.
"It was a voluntary camp for students to come to, where we taught them how to use cameras," Mulligan said. "I definitely think these students feel more vulnerable when they're around someone their own age. Just showing them that if I can do it, they are more than capable to do it themselves and it's not weird, it's very common. They just need to get out of their comfort zone, and to have someone who they can see almost as a friend be there and be supportive of them is really what gets them to want to be involved and to work on their skills."
At 17, Mulligan has already spent six years in the broadcasting program and is applying to colleges to pursue a career in the field.
"I dabbled a little bit in broadcasting in my fifth grade year, but that was just an after-school program," Mulligan said. "But the program really starts in seventh grade, and that's where I began. As you get to the high school level, we have live reporters in the studio. It's just such a great experience every day."
Green takes pride in the program he founded two decades ago.
"It's a live daily broadcast," Green explained. "It's very much a real world program that airs every morning to about 3,000 students live on the campus and on YouTube. For the last 18 years, it's been the number one rated daily high school broadcast in the country. It's an interesting real world experience. Kids come in in the morning, and we kind of put the show together in real time that airs about an hour and a half later."
Even for students who don't pursue broadcasting, the program offers valuable skills.
"It's the sort of class where they're learning how to make brutal, unforgiving deadlines, they're developing self confidence, they're learning how to work with partners, to collaborate," Green said. "So many of the students, they begin in middle school really not sure what they got themselves into, and then they can stand up and by their senior year, they are interviewing people in a live environment, so they develop these tremendous, communication skills. I think a program like broadcasting where they're having to do it all, it's just really invaluable."
Impactful experiences
Mulligan described her Alaska trip as transformative.
"Because when I went on this trip, I learned so much about their culture — more than any textbook could have taught me," Mulligan said. "Just experiencing it for two weeks and seeing how these kids are more than welcoming. They're so loving and they are just so proud of where they come from. It's really empowering. And to see their respect for their elders, and they really are grateful for the life that they have. It just made me so much more grateful for what I have."
Valenti agreed.
"This trip has definitely taught me a lot of gratitude," Valenti said. "Because when you go out there and you see these kids and everything that they have, they work for. So I think that being out there and living with them for a little bit and just talking to them, we really connected. I still talk to those kids. We still connect with them online and social media. I made a lot more friendships, and it just taught me a lot about, just the genuineness of people, especially from other cultures."
Although Green has retired, he has left the program in capable hands. Kurt Kohnen, formerly of KPBS, brings his real-world expertise into the classroom to inspire a new generation of broadcast journalists.
