Over my past three years writing for The Badin Banner, the publication has undergone many changes. Not only has the home page changed from year to year, but both our writers and the type of content we have covered.

In my first year of journalism, The Badin Banner focused a lot more on current news of the school and made an effort to keep people informed about what athletic teams and clubs were up to. Since our staff was small, just about ten of us, we each published once monthly and came out with a new edition each month. This year also included the short lived, but much appreciated student locker tours.

After how much fun I had chasing different news stories that year, that's when I realized that I wanted to continue doing this into college. I will never forget rushing to get an interview with the Australian basketball team that came to Badin, or the countless interviews with Mrs. Halverson I needed to write service stories.

Since I had such a successful year, I knew I needed to take journalism again the next year.

In the next school year, we were hoping for a larger staff than just the ten of us. For promotional purposes, we made a video inspired by "The Office" that included many of our inside jokes from class. Thankfully, this video was successful and the staff grew so large that we needed two different class periods for journalism.

While this posed some challenges having everyone separated, we were still able to produce the best content that we could. We adapted to the larger staff by splitting up into smaller publishing groups. This allowed for more leadership positions and led me to have a more active role in class.

We were able to work with the other class periods by posting our story ideas on a bulletin board like an old-school newsroom. This year, our content focused a lot more on making videos, both for news and entertainment purposes.

However, we hit the ultimate challenge when the pandemic hit and we had to learn from home. It was very hard to cover news when everything was cancelled. The only thing we seemed to be able to write about was COVID and that became exhaustive after some time. At this point we started to cover real world issues from a student's perspective and finished with a special senior edition to commemorate the seniors that had the end of their final year suddenly taken away.

When this school year began, we were very lucky to be in person and writing again. It was unfortunate that many of things we typically write about were cancelled, but we were able to persevere. We are back to one class period and are able to work together again and come up with fun story ideas like the Teacher Nerf Wars.

As my time as a Badin Banner reporter comes to an end, there are many lessons I learned and many memories I will never forget. There's things like Ashley McKinney's granola cups, Lauren Harris quotes and annual Christmas parties. From AP Style to Mr. Brightside, I will never forget The Badin Banner for leading me to my future career path. If I happen to become a super famous journalist and win an Emmy, my first thank you is to The Badin Banner.

These past three years have been amazing, thank you for everything. I can't wait to see what the future holds.

-- Caroline Kammerer, senior reporter