Aizley clip 2

let's start by explaining again what CLASS! was. In brief, we say CLASS! is a newspaper written by, for and about the high school students of Clark County. That included all the high schools including the private schools. We had kids at every school who were kind of our correspondents. We worked with the journalism teachers, with the principals, with anybody who wanted to get involved. The Spanish section was started by Elise Ax. Have you met Elise Ax? No. SARI: That's not her name anymore. Elise Wolff. Oh, that's somebody you may want to meet. She's Jewish and her father?oh, she was wonderful. She was such a biggie in the school district. When she found out what we were doing, she asked us if we would please do a section for Spanish language kids. That's why we have this section in every newspaper. It's at least four pages. It's called Diagnos. Diagnos. I think that means talk to us. Let's talk. Yes, let's talk; something like that. So that got started in there and it just... But you left out the part about why David wanted to do this. David is David Phillips? Yes. And that's your son? Yes. Explain why he wanted to do this. That's good. PAUL: Well, he was a graduate of Bishop Gorman High School and he didn't know what other kids were doing and he thought the newspaper would allow the kids to talk across the county. So that was his idea. SARI: All his other friends were going to regular Clark County School District schools and he didn't know what they were doing. They were all over the area; it wasn't like they were all in one school. So David said he wanted to have a sense of what his friends were doing. They could share their ideas and their happy times and their hard times. There have been some very heavy duty editorials in that paper written by kids. PAUL: The schools themselves put too much restriction on what the kids can do and say. We had to pay attention to that also, but they were able to say things in CLASS! that they couldn't say in their school newspaper. So there was less censorship. Yes, less censorship. Now, if we got something that was politically slanted one way or another, we always went out and got an opposing view and we matched them up. We would have the two views in the same issue, on the same page, actually. How did you get the students involved? Started by going to schools and talking to the principals, asking if they would allow the publication in the school, and could we involve the journalism teachers or the English teachers or whoever we wanted, and nobody said no. It was amazing. If we ran into an issue that was a little touchy, we would talk to the teacher about it.