An Open Letter from the Beacon Leadership Team

Recently, The Beacon received a comment from a reader that heavily criticizes the publication, the work it produces, and the effectiveness of the leadership team. Rather than publish that comment on a specific article, we would like to address it publicly in this open letter to our AISG community. 

Although we will not publish the comment, we would like to address its main concerns, namely that the author feels that: 

1. Quality and quantity of articles has decreased 

1. Student leadership team are not participating actively nor leading effectively 

1. Journalism has become a place for students to sleep and get “easy” CAS credit 

This time of school closure has been an unprecedented experience for both students and teachers, both for the duration and the severity of the circumstance. For the first several weeks of closure, it was unclear how long such a situation would last, and Beacon staff were encouraged to focus more heavily on their core academic subjects at the direction of our faculty advisor Ms. Dean. Administrators also expressed a desire to minimize student stress, and faculty were asked to be mindful of expectations during online learning, focusing on key content and reducing student workload. As an elective course for either academic or CAS credit, Journalism took a back seat to other classes to reduce stress and workload on students already stretched thin by less than ideal working conditions. 

During a normal school year, students enrolled in Journalism for CAS credit are required to publish 10 articles, with some variation accepted based on length and level of background work. CAS students will not receive their credit for Journalism if the quota is not met. Students enrolled in Journalism for class are required to complete 20 articles with the same guidelines. Class students are enrolled for academic credit, meaning that they receive grades and scores based on a rubric just as in other classes. This year, due to the COVID-19 outbreak and school closure, Ms. Dean changed the requirements for CAS and class students as she deemed appropriate, allowing students to focus on core subjects during online learning. 

The Beacon is a student-led publication, and as such is subject to the limitations of student writing. While we do our best to help students better their work with workshop and editing and conferencing, admittedly some work will not reflect the highest standards that we all might hope for. The purpose of The Beacon is to share news of AISG interest to the school community, but as a class, the purpose of Journalism is to teach the conventions of journalism and to improve student writing.  

In a normal Journalism class, students brainstorm and propose article topics of current relevance and student interest. These sessions are led by Ms. Dean or the student editors-in-chief. These articles are then divided up among the members of the team and students work on research, interviewing, drafting, and conferencing.  

When choosing topics to write for their articles, students have independence and freedom to make their own decision within certain limits. Article topics and ideas are shared among students and monitored by the leadership team and Ms. Dean through the Microsoft Planner to make sure all major topics—local and global—are covered. We would love to see our staff take on more challenging pieces that require depth of research, critical analysis, and time commitment. We will work on ways to encourage students to take on these challenges, particularly our CAS students who are typically only present in Journalism once per 4 days. 

We are sorry to hear if our readership is disappointed in the focus of some of the topics, but we encourage a broad exploration of the articles on offer; we are confident that there will be areas of interest for the majority of our community.  

The purpose of The Beacon is to provide a source for students to receive information regarding school events and the world in general. Both CAS and class members can use Journalism as an opportunity to improve their formal writing skills (including grammar, structure of an article, and formal tone) while also using The Beacon as a chance to logically express their voices, opinions, and perspectives regarding certain issues, by writing an editorial or opinionated piece. This allows CAS students to reflect on the “creativity” aspect of their IB journey. Just as in any class or group endeavor, there are varying levels of quality and commitment. In this process, the student editors-in-chiefs have the responsibility of ensuring that articles are published with an attention to timeliness, relevance, and reasonable quality.  

The Beacon editing team is a group of student writers who have also taken on the additional role of editing articles. The main role of editors is to edit and polish articles written by class or CAS members of The Beacon. We make sure all articles are checked by editors before publishing and all members of The Beacon are encouraged to always read over published articles to find possible mistakes. We will continue to emphasize that editors not only need to check for grammatical errors but also content issues, whether it be incorrect information or simply incomplete. If our readers do not find our editing sufficient, they are always welcome to share respectful, constructive criticism or feedback in the comments. 

We have always tried to remain transparent about how The Beacon is run. We do not have specific people assigned to specific topics; rather we prefer to let students have free reign over their articles, so long as all the important events are covered. We will keep writers on a strict deadline of when to get their articles ready for publishing, and afterwards it is sent out to an editor, who will publish it. Students who have demonstrated a strong competent use of the English language are asked to become editors; this is determined both by testing and observations of their writing.  

The Beacon team is appreciative of the AISG community’s continued support of the publication as well as its constructive criticism for the publication. However, we ask for comments to be kept polite and in a respectful manner. Comments that do not adhere to conventions of respectful discourse will not be approved for publication in response to articles. While we will accept critical feedback, we also want to keep a positive and supportive environment for both readers and writers. We appreciate the support of our community in reading our work and encouraging our continued growth.

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If our readers are unsatisfied with the quality of our work, we will try to improve it. We are currently looking for a more user-friendly system of reader idea submissions: for now, please email one of the editors-in-chief with any topic suggestions or constructive criticism.