During their last episode, BBN announced that their news program is moving out of English class to third period SSR so that all students and teachers will see the BBN at the same time.
Today, that dreaded change begins.
When asked for reasons why this change was taking place, Mr. Herzfeld said,” It has been the intention of Baron Broadcast News since its inception to be a school-wide broadcast. Until recently, we have not had the infrastructures to make that happen effectively.”
Interesting, but honestly, students don’t care what BBN was supposed to be. We were content with watching BBN during English class. We enjoyed the bi-weekly reprieve from the academic grind we’re subjecting ourselves to here at FVHS. But that break from our studies is another reason the BBN is being moved to SSR.
Herzfeld noted that English teachers have sacrificed instructional time for years, while other departments haven’t been asked to give up teaching time at all. This poses as a concern to administration because English and writing scores are extremely important to school and student success.
Not everyone feels that time spent watching the BBN is a sacrifice of class time. Several students have reported that their English teachers use the BBN as content for class discussion, debates, argumentative writing among other learning activities. The BBN and teaching time do not have to be mutually exclusive.
But some people think they are and so today, we’ll be watching the BBN during SSR. This leaves only 15 minutes for the episode. Students dread the possible loss of some of the creative and fun elements to BBN. With the reduction in time, priority will likely be given to clips that are most relevant news-wise. One thing that will certainly be absent are the end credits which are often the most creative and entertaining parts of the BBN (although some English teachers stop playing the BBN once it gets to that point). Hopefully the BBN will not remove skits such as Nasayugara and clips from the “Pho-nomenal Five” crew.
Herzfeld also explained that BBN was initially designed as a network so that news could be broadcasted throughout the entire school at the same time. He hoped that, “Down the road, we may be able to do a portion of the broadcasts live, which would give the BBN students a more realistic newscaster experience both on camera and behind the scenes.”
As optimistic and hopeful as this sound, with all the budget cuts happening around school and the money that would be need to be allocated to BBN to make a live broadcast possible, just doesn’t seem plausible at the moment. Mr. Ziebarth, advisor to BBN, also agrees that “It’s not going to happen anytime soon.”
But, Mr. Herzfeld does make a point that it would be beneficial to BBN by exposing them to more realistic news casting, but it can still be felt that BBN won’t be the same due to their new time constraint. BBN is more than a mere school broadcasting school network. It’s a student outlet that lets students know what’s going on before, during, and after school hours. It provides so much more than a regular broadcast. It gives students more interest in school and leads them to be more active. It’s a program that pumps up school spirit by showing videos and clips of our hardworking ASB, our sports teams, our clubs, and many more.
And a few weeks ago, a Facebook page was created in response to the move of BBN, although approximately 1,000 people have joined the cause, will it change anything? Only time will tell and today the clock starts ticking.
