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Key Finding 3

High School Media Offerings - Curricular and Extra-Curricular

Finally, the Future of the First Amendment study also surveyed administrators from a representative sample of high schools across the country to gauge the degree to which high schools are offering curricular and extracurricular opportunities for students to learn about and/or participate in the media. It quickly becomes apparent that some of the key obstacles to high schools offering such opportunities ? budget cuts and apathy ? do not affect all parts of the country and all community types evenly.

High schools in suburban communities (82 percent) are significantly more likely to offer student newspapers as an activity than high schools in rural communities (68 percent). High schools in urban communities (77 percent) tend to fall somewhere in between.

High schools in the red states were also more likely (79 percent) to offer student newspapers than high schools located in the blue states (69 percent).

High schools located in the Northeast (76 percent) are much less likely to assign one or more faculty members to serve as formal advisers to student publications than are high schools located in the Midwest (85 percent), the South (89 percent) or the West (83 percent).

As a group, high schools located in the Northeast are also more likely than schools in other regions to say they offer no journalism classes at all. Of the Northeastern high schools surveyed, 27 percent said that they currently have no students enrolled in classes primarily dedicated to teaching journalism skills, a far greater percentage than indicated that was the case in Midwest schools (16 percent) and Southern schools (14 percent), and more than three times the percentage of Western schools that indicated they have no students currently in journalism classes (8 percent).

Meanwhile, some red state-blue state differences are again noticeable here: schools in blue states (22 percent) are more than twice as likely as schools in red states (10 percent) to offer no journalism instruction at all.

A much greater percentage of rural schools (20 percent) lack journalism instruction than is the case in either suburban schools (11 percent) or urban schools (12 percent).

?Approximately what percentage of students (grades 9-12) at your school are currently enrolled in classes primarily dedicated to journalism skills?

At the other extreme, 12 percent of suburban schools indicate that 20 percent or more of their students are currently enrolled in classes primarily dedicated to journalism skills, twice the percentage of urban schools (6 percent) which reported similarly high levels of participation.

Among these administrators, 79 percent at Midwest schools say they'd like to see their schools expand student media programs, somewhat less than the percentage at Northeast (89 percent), Southern (89 percent) or Western schools (87 percent) who felt that way.

Where does student learning about media and journalism rank among administrators' priorities? One in five (20 percent) of those at Southern and Western schools ranked it as a high priority, while just 12 percent of those at Northeastern schools and 15 percent of those at Midwestern schools ranked it high. And just 13 percent ranked it as a high priority at rural schools.

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