OWENSVILLE —Owensville High School (OHS) English and publications teacher Amy Quetermous presented Newspaper Publications in Missouri High Schools program to 16 educators at the April 9 Write to Learn Conference in Columbia, and encouraged others to do the same.

Quertermous, sponsor for the student publication The Dutch Mill, told teachers that her program  partners with the local newspaper to provide coverage of the school district.

Collaboration

“We collaborate with our local newspaper, The Gasconade County Republican, and I just want to share how that collaboration came to be and what we saw not only with our students as writers, but also with our community,” Quertermous began.

Sharing her background as the English department chair, a 12-year educator, with eight years teaching at the eighth-grade level and another four years at the high-school level, and serving as the National Honor Society sponsor for the class of 2027, Quertermous said she actually began her career in finance.

“Prior to being a teacher or going into education, I was an accounting major,” Quertermous said. “I worked in accounting for 12 years, so I have a little bit of real world experience before I transitioned into education.

“So, I had a little bit of real world experience before I transitioned into education,” she said. “Notice I do not have any journalism. My Masters is in curriculum and instruction, but I’ll walk through how we kind of skipped over the whole journalism piece. I’m learning as they’re learning.”

It came to her one evening that she’d like to see the district have a high school publication, and maybe she could share it for free on Canva.

“I had this brilliant idea, the newspaper and  journalism class had not been a part of our school for over 10 years,” Quertermous said. “There was a very popular, legendary newspaper that happened within the building for decades, The OHS Spectator, and it kind of fell away.”

Quertermous went to OHS Principal Kris Altemeyer about her idea, and discovered the newspaper had also been seeking a collaboration project with them.

“He handed me this letter from Roxie Murphy at The Republican saying, ‘hey, we’d like to do this collaboration at your school,” Quertermous said. “Then it just immediately started happening. We had to fill it with students, which was the more difficult part, because saying ‘I want you to write, but not necessarily for me. I want you to share this with the community, and convince some kids to take my class.’”

Quertermous took the first months of the school year to teach students how to write for a newspaper. The first edition came out in March 2024.

What changes when students know their work will be read by the community?

Focusing on the changes in students’ writing style, Quertermous said the audience made the difference.

“What changes when students know their work will be read by the community and not just their teacher? It’s a lot,” she said. “There’s a vast difference in my writers in my introductional class than any of my other classes, and there’s a big change.”

Giving educators an example, Quertermous retrieved an article she said was from the very early stages of the program.

“The article was ‘Beta Club introduces new member,” she shared before reading the piece.

There is a lot going on in the story, with flowery, descriptive language painting the scene like a storybook picture.

“There’s a lot of descriptions, rather than just ‘here’s the facts,’” Quertermous began. “Today, I’m going to walk you through how we built this collaboration; what worked; what didn’t, and then how you can replicate it yourself.

Building a framework

Early in the discussion, student journalists decided they didn’t want The Dutch Mill publication to mimic The Republican.

“We decided as a classroom that we’re not just going to share everything that everybody else already shared in the newspaper, like we’re chatting with our sports,” she said. “We’re actually going to dig a little bit deeper and then share us as people to make a better connection with our communities.”

Learning what they wanted to do and how to do it was slow.

“We’re the pilot program, and we had a lot of things we had to figure out, especially being the teacher and not having any kind of journalism background,” Quertermous said. “But I do enjoy writing.”

As a teacher, Quertermous has also encouraged students to write with paper and pencil in her classroom, fostering a love for the written word.

“My biggest fear was that nobody was going to want to do it with me, and so we didn’t have a class,” she said. “In order to push a class into the schedule, I had to get students on board.”

Walking through her classes in spring 2024, she advocated for her class, telling students who enjoyed writing as much as she did about the opportunity.

“Some of them were very reluctant,” she said. “Some of them just wanted an easy writing class in their last year.”

During her first school year in 2024-25, Quertermous had 12 students in the publications classroom, which couldn’t officially be called a journalism class because it was missing the journalism component. Several members of the class were seniors, and classroom management was sometimes challenging.

“Then, the biggest thing was having Roxie (Murphy) and a few members of The Republican come in and work directly with students,” Quertermous said. “Jacob Warden actually helped us get our website going, and sat down with them and said, ‘Hey, what do you want it to look like? What are the categories that you want to have?’ So the students had ownership, not the newspaper.”

Dave Marner, managing editor of the newspaper, shared advice on photography, explaining assignments to the class as a whole. Owner Dennis Warden attended one class period to talk about how to get sponsors for the student pages.

Publishing and other logistical adventures

Once the writing aspect and photography skills were covered, Quertermous began to look at logistics, and there were a lot.

“We needed a schedule, like, when were we going to print? I was very scared, and I wanted to go very slow, because I’m not a journalist. And Roxie was ready to jump in with both feet, like, ‘hey, let’s print next month.’ And I’m like, ‘okay, let’s take a breath.’”

The Dutch Mill made its debut online as both the teacher and the students worked to understand the system that was built into The Gasconade County Republican’s website.

Editing was another discussion.

“Who’s going to edit first? Are we going to peer edit? Who’s going to be the last person to see it before it goes to print?” Quertermous asked. “What are we going to own? What is the newspaper going to own? What about layout? Our students aren’t quite to the point where they can go over to the newspaper and begin laying out pages.”

Students were instructed to create a run sheet for each edition to prioritize articles, show which photos went with which story, and name the writer/photographer, and story length.

“We send (The Republican) our run sheet and all of our articles and photos, and they pick what goes in,” Quertermous said, adding that students see the product on the page before it goes to print. “That’s like a really nice, real world experience for our students, to be able to say, ‘Oh, I wrote this.’”

Then it’s off to prepare for the next issue.

“Our first issue really didn’t happen for a while,” Quertermous said.

What is the purpose of The Dutch Mill

“Our purpose is to connect with the community,” Quertermous told the group. “Since covid, there’s been kind of a disconnect, and so we’ve had several bond issues for things that we need in the district. They failed every time the last three years. This week, it was kind of disheartening. Not that the community wasn’t supportive, the majority passed it, but we didn’t have that little percentage.”

She said the student reporters in the publications class have tried to show the community what they do.

“We’ve worked really hard to kind of build that gap as the newspaper and kind of share with the community, beyond the sports things that happen,” Quertermous said, reiterating that the sports articles are important, and The Dutch Mill covers it, too. “But we have enough staff members from The Republican coming to the building and reporting on all those things, so I try to instill in them, well, don’t just report the facts of this game. Tell me something else that happened. Tell me the student’s point of view. Tell me what the students were doing during the game. Tell me what they feel was important that happened, rather than from the view of the photographer. So that’s our overall goal every month, is ‘what is the story that we want to tell about ourselves?’”

The Dutch Mill’s Student Editor Abigail Morgan said she has always enjoyed creative writing and took a chance on the newspaper class.

“Then, once we joined, I got, like, a purpose to write for. I had just certain things I had to tell the community, and it gave me this little boost of, ‘yeah, I’m doing this right. People know what I’m trying to say,’” Morgan said.

Staff writer Arianna Baguio said she was not confident in her writing before, but she is now.

“Like, I could tell you, like how to write an article and how to critique it, but I feel like there are more things that I could improve on,” Baguio said.

Course prerequisite

The publications class is for juniors and seniors only.

“We chose that they could be juniors and seniors, and they could continue multiple years because we wanted to build a staff,” Quertermous explained. “They have to have approval from their sophomore teacher and from me. They have to successfully complete either English two, English two honors, or English three or English three honors. They can enter as a junior or a senior, and they can take it both their junior and senior years.”

The student journalism staff is made up of a diverse group that highlights the programs available at OHS and throughout the district.

The OHS Dutch Mill staff have already begun mentoring a group of OES fourth graders who began the OES PRESS.

Quertermous said she sees the improvement across the board.

“This is one of our more recent issues, where our students are now working with our elementary school, and so they shared their own experience there,” Quertermous said. “They’re now walking through ‘the life of a student council president,’ which also led to, let’s share with the community ‘life as a freshman.’”

Quertermous is about to graduate students from the remnants of the first journalism staff, and next year she will start fresh, using what she’s learned over the last two years to begin building a new staff. She shared some free resources she used in the beginning.

“Quite honestly, three of my staff members have been with me for two years. They don’t really need it anymore,” she said of the link. “I will go back, because next year, when all of my students are juniors and seniors, I’ll start fresh again. This is the first thing we will do, and we will do it several times so that they start pulling in: what can we write about?”