Students across Long Island who study broadcasting in high school will soon have an awards show to call their own, and it all started with an idea Southold/Greenport Superintendent David Gamberg, teachers Jim Stahl and Jason Wesnofske and audio-visual specialist Eric Kehl came up with.
“We noticed that the students at Southold and Greenport had developed a very effective broadcast program,” said Gamberg. “And we started to look around for competitions that recognize quality work. There wasn’t much out there.”
So Gamberg and the others started to brainstorm about the possibility of hosting a competition and inviting school districts that have broadcasting programs at the high school level.
“We found that there were six or eight schools sprinkled around that have this type of learning process and we began to organize this event,” he said.
And so the Broadcasting Awards for Senior High (BASH) was born as a way to celebrate student media journalism. The inaugural event will be held at Southold High School on June 5, and as of this week over 150 students, faculty and guests are planning to attend.
Three judges have signed on so far: veteran reporter Drew Scott from News 12, reporter Pei-Sze Cheng from News 4 New York and multimedia reporter Krysten Massa from The Suffolk Times. The keynote speaker will be CNN international correspondent Miguel Marquez.
Students will submit their competition entries electronically and judges will use a rubric to score them. The rubric covers elements such as content, camera work and editing; prizes will be awarded for Best Broadcast, Best Anchor Team, Most Entertaining Package and five other categories.
The BASH team is working on providing workshops given by judges, teachers or students, but haven’t finalized those yet.
Gamberg, who was instrumental in bringing the broadcasting program to the high schools, can hardly contain his enthusiasm and excitement when talking about BASH.
“BASH is extremely important on many levels, not just to recognize the quality of work students are doing in this area but because it reflects and represents the 21st century landscape of learning and digital citizenship and the importance of both producing and consuming information in a medium that is absolutely here to stay.”
There have been about a half dozen schools so far who’ve submitted entries and Gamberg was pleased to say that a few districts who don’t yet have broadcasting programs will be sending teams of teachers and students to see what Southold is doing and to learn how to initiate their own programs.
“It’s such a compliment,” says Gamberg proudly. “Southold initiated all this. It’s like we’re breaking ground here with BASH; nothing like this exists.”
