Mesquite Campus Program Inspires Future Broadcasters

  • Anyone who has seen a local TV weathercast or a sci-fi action movie is probably familiar with a “green screen,” but third and sixth graders at TBP’s Mesquite campus are getting a first-person perspective on this technology each week as they deliver the campus’ daily announcements as part of the broadcasting team.

  • Recorded after school on Wednesdays, the daily program has students delivering announcements, pledges to the American and Texas flags, a moment of silence, lunch menu for the day, and breaking news.
     
    “When I was in school, there was this old program with Maria Menounos and I always thought ‘I want my students to be Maria Menounos’,” campus counselor and broadcast program sponsor Lauren Kilgore said.

  • The program was designed to allow students to take an active role in their campus while also teaching them new technical and communication skills.

    “I feel like anytime I have more responsibility than the kids do, I need to share that responsibility, so they have that ownership,” Kilgore said. “I like the idea of having the kids in the school see their peers in the mornings to form those connections across grade levels and be role models for each other.”

    The program, a partnership between Kilgore and sixth grade English and Social Studies teacher Angela Romansky, teaches students to plan out their newscast, rehearse lines to avoid use of scripts, and builds both communication skills through practicing delivery for fluency while looking at a camera and confidence by doing all this in front of their classmates who are busily working on memorizing their own scripts.
     
    “Ms. Kilgore came to me to get help from someone with good technology skills, but the program was all her idea,” Romansky said. “We started with a few sixth graders. We now have a dozen sixth and third graders and have divided them into teams of researchers and broadcasters.”