Bellmore-Merrick Broadcasting Earns Excellence Award

Bellmore-Merrick Broadcasting Earns Excellence Award

The Bellmore-Merrick Broadcasting program in the Central High School District has been named a 2022 Student Television Network Broadcast Excellence Award winner.

Photos courtesy of Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District

The Broadcast Excellence award honors a select number of schools across the nation for their “student-produced programs that meet a standard of excellence. Programs are evaluated holistically based on one show entry, as well as the program’s website and social media channels.”

“This award is STN’s highest honor as it recognizes not only the contributions of a select few students who may have worked on a single project, but instead celebrates the contributions of every member of the program,” explained Program Director Stu Stein. “It is quite remarkable that in only our sixth year in existence, BMB has joined 13 programs from across the country including perennial powerhouses like Carlsbad High School in San Diego and Christopher Columbus High School in Miami in winning this award.”

This recognition is born from the hard work, passion, and dedication of current crop of amazing broadcasters who have worked tirelessly throughout the year to take all of the broadcasts from the weekly (Morning Announcements, Midweek Update and This Week at BMB) monthly (Talkin’ Cookies, Sports Talk and Film Festival) and live event coverage to a previously unimaginable level, he explained.

“Getting to this point so quickly would not have been possible without the contributions of our first few classes and the work they did to get us to this point,” added Stein. “In just the short clip shown at the award ceremony, we saw graphics made by Kyle Santagato (2020) and Rocco Law (2020), a segment launched by Mike “The Storm” Daniels (2019) the anchor desk made famous by AJ Fried (2021) and Michele Spiller (2021) and we heard the iconic BMB theme originally put together by Jason Spiller (2018). It also has to be said that we could never have reached this point without the contributions of Sean Petraitis (2021), Louie Saraceni (2021) and Mike Galfano (2021) who not only kept us on the air during the darkest days on the pandemic but actually lit a path for all of our current students to follow that has led directly to this moment.”

In addition to Stein, BMB is led by teachers Lisa Kalish, Jaclyn Kratzer and Matthew Russell.