IHSPA 2025
Writer of the Year submission
All stories published on wsspaper.com
A new vision for elementary education
Published Nov. 19, 2024
This in-depth news article is one of my favorite’s I’ve ever written. My beat is the school board, so when the district proposed changing the way the elementary school system works, it fell on me to cover it. Through my research and conversations with district admin and community members, I discovered that these changes had the potential to have widespread effects — good and bad. This article won a Best of SNO.
Iowa’s 2025 legislative session: an introduction
Published Jan. 30, 2025
I’ve had an interest in politics for quite a while but didn’t know much about how the government worked until I taught myself through covering politics for the WSS. I did a similar story to this last year, where I previewed what was up-and-coming in the Iowa legislature at the beginning of its legislative session. This year, I decided to reach out to politicians to hear directly from them about what they thought the session would look like. It was a lot of fun to get the opportunity to talk to my legislators, even if I didn’t agree with all of their views. Through covering politics for the WSS, I hope to make politics more easy to understand and follow for high schoolers.
Substantially limited
Published Feb. 28, 2025
I was inspired to write this article after being denied a 504 plan. I originally pitched this story as an opinion column, but it ended up becoming a health and science feature. In the process of writing this article, I got to talk to students with experiences very similar to my own and draw attention to the struggles people with lower support needs (meaning someone with a disability who needs less support to be able to participate in daily life and achieve their goals) face, specifically getting accommodations at school. This article was also published in our print edition, and I wrote a supplemental “what it feels like” article, which allowed me to be more in-depth about student’s personal experiences, and write about my own. This article won a Best of SNO.
Spice tolerance: how Booktok has ruined romance
Published Feb 21, 2025
Spice tolerance is an opinion article I wrote with my friend Anna about the concerning trend of “spicy” romance novels in the hands of younger and younger readers (often thanks to social media like “Booktok”). While the original idea of the article was just to focus on that trend, we thought it would be interesting to explore the intersection between problematic content and banning books. We are both people that are against book bans, something that directly affected our school library after SF 496 was passed over a year ago. This was a really interesting article to put together; we got the chance to talk to students and our school’s head librarian about their opinions and experiences with Booktok, romance novels and book bans. I took prioritized working on the writing and researching for this article and Anna did the art and multimedia, along with helping me finish up the article after I wrote an outline.
Kindness, community and compliments
Published March 9, 2025
​As Features Editor, I love writing about the lives of the people around me. After a West High confessions page went viral on Instagram a few months ago, my school’s administration threatened legal action if it was not removed. A few weeks later, a compliments page was started by an anonymous student. It too, went viral around the school and instead of spreading rumors, people were spreading kindness. A few days in, the student revealed her identity; her name is Sebnati Jamal and this is her story.
I worked on this article with fellow staffer Lila Eastvold. She helped out with the interviewing process and the multimedia while I took charge of the writing process.