Belleville High School students have collectively created a first-ever digital newspaper in Mrs. Boulas’s journalism and mass media class. This elective course is comprised of 25 upper-class students.

This is exciting as it has been quite some time since Belleville High School has had a student-generated news source. In fact, it’s been over a decade.

In 2001-2002 Mr. Musser created the paper – an actual tangible newspaper you could take home – with the help of 28 students during his first year of teaching.

Students were able to pick different topics and stories, which ranged from sports to entertainment happening at the school. There were no set section editors, everyone edited their own content. Mr. Musser also allowed different pieces for the paper, such as little games and activities students thought were interesting.

The newspaper lasted as long as students were interested and wanted it to be in class. Some obstacles that removed the class from the list of courses were the lack of student interest in print and an increasing interest in technology within the electronic industry.

Mrs. Boulas has a passion for journalistic style writing and saw there was interest, so she pitched the idea in 2021. It is now an elective course that is hopefully here to stay.

To prepare students for producing publications, students are taught the basics of writing, photo composition, ethics in journalism and more. Mrs. Boulas understood how important it is to offer students more voice and choice in what they wanted to accomplish as part of the newspaper staff. Every student has an assigned duty that focuses on their interests and strengths while writing articles for the bi-monthly publications.

Some students are designated as photographers while other students are article editors or web page editors.

This student-driven class, through a collective decision and a couple rounds of voting that involved the school community, came up with the name of the school’s first-ever digital newspaper: Beneath the Stripes.

You can check out this newspaper at your convenience to see every article the students write. It’s important to keep the history that people started and we hope Beneath the Stripes is here to stay!