HVRHS students bring back student newspaper

FALLS VILLAGE — Students from Housatonic Valley Regional High School wrote and produced the inaugural edition of HVRHS Today, a new student newspaper which can be found on pages A5-8 this week and online.

This work is part of a new student journalism initiative of The Lakeville Journal and is supported by Funds of Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation and the 21st Century Fund for HVRHS.

This week’s issue of HVRHS Today marks the first student-led journalism effort at the high school in several years.

“We launched this program because we believe in the power of local journalism to connect our communities and amplify student voices,” said James Clark, CEO/Publisher of The Lakeville Journal and The Millerton News.

“We’ve long been committed to supporting the next generation of journalists through our competitive summer internship program. But with this new high school initiative, students are reporting for their own newspaper in print and online — giving them a platform and a voice in their own community.”

Anna Gillette, Mia DiRocco, Shanaya Duprey, Madelyn Johnson and Ibby Sadeh formed the first group of students behind HVRHS Today.

They got to work just before spring break, meeting for the first time as a team at the Lakeville Journal office in Falls Village on Wednesday, April 9. That afternoon, the team hit the ground running throwing out ideas for their first reporting projects and discussing the basics of gathering news and reporting facts.

In the following weeks, the students gathered weekly every Thursday at the Lakeville Journal office to discuss interviewing, writing and reporting and plan their coverage for the paper. The students took the lead at every turn, choosing which topics they would like to cover and deciding what sources were best for each story.

The six-week program that ran from early April to the end of the 2025 school year served as an introduction to a more regular program expected to begin in the fall. Starting at the beginning of the next semester, another group of students will assemble to produce two more sections.

The collection of work ranges from reporting on the boons of the new tennis courts to HVRHS’s Sondheim Award winner, with a brief stop in Europe along the way.

To learn more about The Lakeville Journal’s education programs, go to www.lakevillejournal.com or email publisher@lakevillejournal.com