Jewish Student Connection Welcomes Holocaust Survivor

Creek's lecture hall was packed to the gills, but I found a place in the crowd as 88-year-old Osi Sladek spoke to students and teachers about his experiences fleeing the Nazis. But my job wasn't just to tell his story, but also to explain what he represented to our students. CCHS now has a Jewish club full of concerned students, worried that the Holocaust and its horrible crimes will be forgotten amid today’s re-emerging antisemitism and falsified history. It was important to me to share their concerns, including their hopes that Sladek could discredit the "Holocaust deniers" and dispel the bigots, from our school to around the world. My story was as much about these students as it was about Vladek. This story gave me a challenge of finding perspectives that tell new and less visible narratives. It inspired me to look beyond the obvious story and find new angles and valuable insights.

Community Plays Part in Bond Planning, Campaigning

For our Fall print issue in-depth cover story, Editor-in-Chief Quinn Rudnick and I wrote a comprehensive voter guide on the proposed Bond tax package that would direct hundreds of millions of dollars to a school rebuild. Obviously that is no small cost for tax payers! So we wanted to investigate every bit of the proposed plan and how it would affect Creek and the community. My portion was community based, and how people could interact in citizen groups with architects, designers, and admin to contribute ideas to the huge pool of ideas. This was big news, so I made sure to talk to members of local planning groups, teachers, tech center employees, and students. One notable part of the story that I uncovered and made a priority to mention was that the citizen planning group I talked to did not accept student input. I thought that was interesting for a school rebuild project, so I made note of it in the story, which I was very happy with.

The print version of this story received CSMA Honors.

Pop Culture Invites Surge of Antisemitism

After students at Cherry Creek High School's neighbor and feeder school, Campus Middle School, drew swastikas on themselves after a Holocaust education program, the Union Street Journal decided to make our next magazine cover story about antisemitism in schools and nationwide. Our Editor-in-Chief reported on the school angle, and I took an approach of exploring pop culture's effects on the issue. I talked to members and the sponsor of our school's Jewish Student Connections club, making sure to focus on celebrities like Kanye West and Elon Musk, who are in the center of nationwide antisemitism - Musk opened the door, through his social media platform X, for many contentious antisemitic comments, while West tweeted remarks that went viral for threatening Jews. I wrote about the conflicting dilemma of monetarily supporting those celebrities, through products like Teslas, Yeezys, or Twitter Blue. Because the regional branch of the Anti Defamation League was getting involved in the antisemitic incident at Campus, I called the Denver office. I interviewed the regional director within an hour of my original call, who provided integral expertise in the story about the widespread and tendentious topic of antisemitism relating to social media. He remains one of my essential contacts I have reached out to when reporting on issues to do with antisemitism. I hoped the story would pinpoint, in public schools, how pop culture had created such an impact in schools, especially where celebrities have such an influence of student life. I was proud to bring this important issue to the spotlight in the school - it's not just about the controversy. It's about the people behind it and their influence on the community.

This story was awarded Best of SNO and CSMA Honors.