ROYAL CITY — Royal High School students can’t say they don’t know what’s going on in their school.

“Hello, and welcome to this … edition of Royal High School News,” says a young anchorperson, holding a printed script and flanked by a classmate and a coffee mug that says “RHS News.”

The edition changes according to whatever is being recognized on that particular day: National Education Week on Dec. 2, National Zipper Day on April 29. The teenage journalists go on to introduce themselves and the happenings of the day at Royal High School before launching into an interview with a teacher or an athlete.

“The first week, which would be this week, we're planning everything out: what stories we're going to do, everything that needs to get reported,” said Paden Livingston, one of the writers for RHS News. “We're gathering data, and then filming stuff for whatever stories we're doing – and then we just kind of get started working on editing.”

Livingston is joined in writing the news by Katie Carlson, Haley Piercy, Detton Jenks and Carter Noftle. Carlson and Livingston do the majority of the editing as well as filming special segments with students and teachers. Piercy and Jenks focus primarily on senior spotlights, highlighting some of Royal’s outstanding student-athletes. Noftle is currently working on a sports highlight video to wrap up the fall season.

“Then next week, we team up with (the leadership class), and they provide on-air talent,” Livingston said. “They're the anchors and the reporters, and they kind of interact with whatever stories we edited. We usually film that on a Wednesday, so our next one would be next Wednesday (Dec. 14).”

After the final edits are made, the finished product posts to YouTube on Friday.

“We actually began doing it more seriously,” said RHS teacher Jens Jensen, the program’s advisor. “And as time has gone on, we still do the news, they still get the information they need to get, but we do stories half the time that are more playful, fun stuff to get a laugh, to get people to understand that life is maybe not all that serious.”

The digital captions – known as chyrons – introducing the news anchors include an inside joke about the student. Last week’s broadcast identified Maria Salas as “Involved in too many things” and co-anchor Briana Guerrero as “Looks familiar.” Each week’s edition includes something light and teen-oriented. The Dec. 2 edition, for instance, featured student Jocelyn Jenks quizzing teachers with fragments of current slang.

“Hi, and welcome to ‘Are You Trendier than a Teenage Girl,’” Jenks said to the audience, before cornering one teacher after another and asking them to define terms like “vibing” and “hits different,” or name songs off the newest Taylor Swift album. A correct answer was deemed a “slay”; the more numerous wrong answers got a “nay.”

The same edition ended with an in-depth interview with Royal’s student resource officer, RPD Officer Josh Bronn.

“We started the student news last year,” Jensen said. “Really, it was in response to coming out of COVID and getting back to school, and trying to get a positive school culture kick-started again.”

One of the segments the team was filming Wednesday was a competition between teachers Jess Christensen and Jeremy Elliott, to see which could answer more questions in a three-minute period. Because of the season, the questions were Christmas-themed.

Best Christmas gift ever received? Christensen: A baby. Elliott: A bicycle. Favorite Christmas song? Christensen: “Baby, it’s Cold Outside.” Elliott: “Silent Night.” Elves or yetis? Christensen: Elves. Elliott: Yetis. Elliott won the competition 14 questions to 13, perhaps because Christiensen couldn’t settle quickly on her favorite reindeer.

“You’ve got two things,” Jensen said. “You're coming out of COVID, so you have an issue with that. And then number two, you have this generation that is really attached to their phone. So trying to get them to kind of look up and recognize that there's people around them that are living and breathing.”

The RHS News program is actually just one function of Jensen’s student tech support program, which does all sorts of technical projects around the school, including managing labs, printing banners and operating the school’s farm bot, among myriad other things.

“There's a pretty wide array of things that those kids do,” Jensen said. “It's centered in technology and it's fun, because it's a good opportunity. You know, it provides students who I think might disengage a little bit. Sometimes we can struggle to meet the needs of those students who are capable and looking for more autonomy. So (this provides) them with something large to pick up and carry on their own as far as they can.”

Joel Martin can be reached via email at jmartin@columbiabasinherald.com.

Care to watch?

Royal High School News can be seen at www.youtube.com/@mr.jensen8082.