Educator Alert: Final Newsletter of the Academic year

End of the 2024-2025 school year Educator Alert

Hello everyone,

This is the final Educator Alert of the school year. As we wrap up, I wanted to share some highlights and projects we’ve worked on over this past school year.

I would like to thank you all for reading my newsletter every week and working with me throughout these 2 years that I have been an intern at Lookout. I will be graduating from UCSC this Spring and will move back to LA to pursue new opportunities and continue growing.

Wishing you a restful and enjoyable summer. Stay connected with the news, and feel free to reach out to Jamie Garfield (@jamie@lookoutlocal.com) if you have ideas or would like to schedule any classroom visits for the next school year.

2024-2025 Lookout In The Classroom highlights

Here is a collection of the major projects we at the education department at Lookout worked on.

Journalism Scholarship

Our journalism scholarship had a record high turnout in individual submission, 86! We read through every submission and chose 10 students whose stories would be published on our site. The top three students each got a $500 scholarship. And the image above is us rewarding the winners at the Your Future Is Our Business Luncheon.

Classroom Visits

This school year we visited classrooms around the county leading various workshops. We led workshops about journalism and storytelling, helping students with their journalism scholarship applications. We also went to a few classrooms to do career panels and speak to students about different careers in journalism and the news. Special thank you to those teachers who opened up their classrooms to us!

Education Fellowship

We hosted our first education fellow in his second year with the program this school year through UC Santa Cruz’s The Humanities Institute EXCEL Program. Our fellow is college senior Eetai Shwartz, who wants to be a high school history teacher. He worked on designing curriculum, leading class visits and more. He will be graduating this Spring after two great years with Lookout. You can see him in this photo (right) tabling for Lookout Santa Cruz before the YFIOB luncheon.

Student Stories

This year we created a new initiative, Student Stories. Here students can post their opinion stories, promote an event, club, or play they have been working on, or creative writing projects.

Educator Page

Lookout’s Educator page was created for high school teachers to easily use local current events in their classrooms with the intention of students feeling more informed about and connected to their town and community. Visit the Educator Page by clicking here.