curriculum for the program and make sure the radio class would cover the course requirements, which it does, and then some.
A vehicle for students’ passions At Jacket Radio, each student has a specific job. The class runs just like a regular radio station office, complete with a marketing department, a research and outreach team, a sports department, a group dedicated to engineering, as well as programming and music departments. Directing each class period is a student station manager, tasked with managing his or her peers and keeping things running smoothly.
Ethan Carrizales
In total, 150 to 200 students participate in the BIM Jacket Radio class, a popular offering at the junior high. Among them is Ethan Carrizales, a Kemp High School ninth grader who continues to work in the station’s sports department. Participating in Jacket Radio hasn’t just given Carrizales high school credit and business experience — it’s given him a career goal.
“The radio business is helping me learn how to be more professional and how to communicate better with other people,” Carrizales says. “It helps me be more responsible, and I like helping people who can’t make the away games, so they can listen and have fun.” Carrizales has enjoyed commentating on Kemp ISD’s games for Jacket Radio so much that he’s hoping to make a career of sports broadcasting in the future.
▲ Jordan Clack, a Kemp Junior High eighth grader, works as Jacket Radio station manger during the eighth period class.
The benefits of broadcasting When students walk into the Jacket Radio classroom, affectionately nicknamed The Hive, it’s up to them to get straight to work, just like in a real office. “The station is as much theirs as it is mine,” Martin says. “They’re responsible for the programming that goes on it.” The pride the students have in their work keeps them motivated, Martin says, and he’s on hand to help out, but generally speaking, the station is student run and directed.
Martin is impressed by and proud of Carrizales’ performance as a sportscaster. When he first allowed students to start broadcasting games, they largely had to do it on their own, as Martin was busy in his role as a coach during the games. But he says his students took that responsibility and ran with it.
Besides learning the skills involved with running a station, BIM students at Kent Junior High are getting invaluable real-world jobseeking lessons. At the beginning of the year, students create their own résumés and apply for the jobs they want at the station. They then go through job interviews and have the option to reapply for new positions every nine weeks during the school year.
“Ethan’s dad came to me and, in one of the best moments I think I’ve had as a teacher, told me that now this is what he wants to do with the rest of his life,” Martin says. “I don’t think he realized that until he actually started calling the basketball games.”
“Once I get a station manager, the station manager helps me interview for all the other positions,” Martin says. “We interview the rest of the class about which positions they think they’d fit best in.”
Pride in their work Morgan Adrio is an eighth-grade student at Kemp Junior High, and she serves as station manager for her BIM class period. She says her favorite part of the class is meeting new people and learning hands-on business skills. Morgan Adrio
“I like that we interact with so many people, and we learn all kinds of things, like Google Docs and Google Sheets,” Adrio says.
Martin believes that students absorb the skills they learn working on the radio station better than those learned in more traditional classroom settings because of the hands-on, real-world aspect. “Instead of just teaching them how to put something in a spreadsheet, like you’d normally do it, they’re actually doing it because they want to,” Martin says. “They’re learning those skills through this, and these are things they’ll probably actually remember and not something they’ll forget a year from now.”
In an effort to keep former Jacket Radio students involved in broadcasting as they move on in their educations, Martin is currently working with teachers and students at Kemp High School to begin a video broadcast system. There, students will expand their broadcasting skills by creating daily news segments and even short films. “It’s skills they’ve already learned, because they already know how to engineer audio bits, and the crossover between audio and video is not really that much different,” Martin says. “And they feel a bit more comfortable by the time they get up there because they’ve been broadcast on the radio for so long.” Jacket Radio is a big deal in Kemp ISD, and in the community, and Edwards is understandably proud of Martin and his students. He says he’s received inquiries from much larger districts that are interested in implementing similar programs on their own campuses. “You walk into the classroom and there are 20 kids who are all engaged, working,” Edwards says. There’s no playing, there’s no goofing around, they’re all on target because it’s something they love to do and want to do. That’s one of the most impressive things that I see.” You can listen to Jacket Radio online, just visit the district’s homepage at kempisd.org and click on the Jacket Radio link. ◄
BRAGGING RIGHTS 2017-2018 Texas School Business
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