Program Sponsors:
The student voice of Detroit's High Schools.

Student publications must grapple with student deaths

<p>Siblings LaKreisha Johnson and Gemel Brown, former RHS students, died in 2015.jpeg</p>

Siblings LaKreisha Johnson and Gemel Brown, former RHS students, died in 2015.jpeg

Death is inevitable but not typical during high school. When deaths do occur, it creates conversations and learning experiences for Renaissance's yearbook and newspaper staffs, who are given the task of deciding how to appropriately report deaths within the student body.

Current seniors have grieved four peers’ deaths during their time at Renaissance.

Maia Wright lost her battle with cancer on Mar. 7, 2014. Billy Watts ended his life on Oct. 24, 2014. On June 7, 2015, LaKreisha Johnson, then a RHS sophomore, and her brother Gemel Brown, a former RHS student, died in a motorcycle crash. And Chancellor Smith took his own life on Sept. 25, 2016.

This year the RHS yearbook staff must consider two deaths as Johnson was supposed to graduate in June and Smith died during the current academic year.

RHS yearbook and art teacher Rachael Walker has experience handling the subject of death in student publications.

Wright and Watts each had two-page dedication spreads in the yearbooks when they would have graduated, highlighting the impacts they had on their school and community. RHS's student publication Dialogue, formerly FreepHigh, wrote stories about Wright and Watts.

Samantha Hillery, a Herff Jones yearbook sales representative, suggests schools should have policies to eliminate questions of how to publish student deaths.

“What happens if the next person dies, and you don’t do that?" Hillery said. "Are you saying that one person is more important?”

Walker and Hillery agree that a policy for this matter would simplify a complicated issue.

School have various cultures, religions and administrations, therefore district-wide policies are not ideal. Hillery believes that schools should create policies that fit their schools’ needs.

But some schools get by without an official policy.

Former Lake Orion High School newspaper adviser Yvonne Claes developed her own procedure when her school had no policy for reporting deaths in student publications.

“We first talk to the students’ parents, and asked if it would be OK to do a feature story on their son/daughter," Claes said. 

Claes contacted the families directly for permission to publish, as well as her principal, and for pictures, promising to let the families review articles before publication.

The staff included applicable information on the nature of students’ deaths.

“If a student died of cancer, we would run a sidebar story, informing readers about that particular form of cancer. If suicide, we would provide information on depression (if applicable), as well as resources for someone having suicidal thoughts,” Claes said.

Walker suggests the RHS yearbook should publish memorials no longer than one page, “because of the amount of attention it draws to such a negative thing.”

Comments

Comments powered by Disqus

Please note: All comments are eligible for publication in Detroit Dialogue.

Recent Editions