PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A six-minute video by three Science Leadership Academy students has earned an honorable mention in C-SPAN’s 20th annual StudentCam documentary competition.
History teacher Michael Clapper says the entry, "Funding Our Future," from juniors El Palmer, Violet Brenner and Clarisa Lanzas, examines inequities in public school funding from a student perspective.
“It’s not just sort of the larger things that we read about — but trying to give the student experience of that,” Clapper said.
Zach Lowe, a C-SPAN education resource specialist, visited SLA on Monday to honor the students for their work.
“They’re going to be the next generation of leaders, the next generation of consumers of news and public affairs,” Lowe said. “So we offered this opportunity called StudentCam to them to create documentaries and get through some of these very hot-button, very difficult topics.”
SLA student Anna Berman also took third place for her video about disposable fashions: "Fast Fashion: A Race to the Bottom."
"Funding Our Future" presents images of run-down bathrooms in city schools juxtaposed with photos of bright, well-maintained hallways in the suburbs.
“We got a lot of footage from friends in suburban public schools. So we had an interesting experience of having our experience in an urban school versus a suburban school,” said Brenner. “I think that having a public school kid’s perspective on this is very important.”
Palmer said making the video taught students to follow the money. “Because of the way that neighborhoods are taxed and things like that, I think we kind of just learned so much about all of the kind of money aspects that we didn’t really know about before,” Palmer told KYW Newsradio.
“We kind of learned how the history tied in. It was always imbalanced between suburban and urban public schools,” Lanzas said. “I hope that getting the word out there and seeing people that can help us, it’ll inspire them to make change.”
More winners
Kaitlyn Hess and Charlize Ko, 11th graders from Conestoga High School in Berwyn, scored an honorable mention for their documentary "Change in America — The Public Education System."
And a trio of students from Central Bucks South High School were honored for their documentary.