Recently, Park’s student-run newspaper, Echo, and student-run yearbook, Echowan, created surveys to send out to the student body. These polls were sent out to find out what Park’s student journalism organizations can do better, and the results have sparked a wake-up call.
Echowan Advisor Kelsey Hanson said these polls were sent out to find out how students connect with the yearbook and the newspaper. She said they wanted to find out what’s working and what needed to be worked on in the organizations.
“The main goal was sort of out of curiosity about how students engage with their student publications,” Hanson said. “Why do they work and why don’t they? What value do they find in it? If they don’t find any value, why is that? How can we increase engagement for the kids that aren’t engaging?”
Senior Echowan Chief Genevieve Thomas said she was disappointed in the results of the survey. She said she wants Echowan to have more diversity all around.
“I felt disappointed to know what kids feel about our yearbook and how they feel like it’s not as diverse as our student body actually is,” Thomas said. “Now I feel more motivated to make it more diverse.”
Sophomore Echowan staffer Lodo Ferlito said Echowan is trying to expand their diversity across the board, including the yearbook and the class itself.
“We’re working on interviewing and getting content on lots of students of different groups,” Ferlito said. “We’re also trying to recruit more people to make the class more diverse in general.”
Thomas said Echowan hasn’t been super diverse in the past. She said they need to make more efforts in order to diversify the class.
“In the past, there hasn’t been that much effort to make it diverse,” Thomas said. “Echowan has always kind of been the same crowd of kids coming generation after generation, and we haven’t really had the chance to branch out to different social groups and get that diversity like we need to.”
Hanson said there are multiple reasons for why the survey results came out the way that they did. She said not only was the student body underrepresented, but the yearbook comes with a price tag that not everyone can afford.
“The yearbook is super expensive so there’s a cost right there that makes some students not want to buy it,” Hanson said. “Also if you look in the yearbook, it’s not incredibly representative of our entire student body. It can be way more diverse, and that’s something that we are working on in this class.”
Ferlito said even though the results were a little disappointing, he has hope for the future of Echowan.
“Obviously the survey didn’t go exactly how we wanted it to,” Ferlito said. “Now we can learn from this feedback and only go up from here.”
