Over the past thirty years, budget cuts have forced hundreds of high school newspapers across California to shut down.  The worst impact has been at inner city schools, which rely almost entirely on school district funding.  The newspaper at Susan Miller Dorsey High School in Los Angeles stayed alive longer than most, but finally fell silent in 2001.  Five years later, Mark Campbell, a dedicated English teacher at Dorsey, set out to revive the “Dorsey Gram.”  With the support of a group of citizens who formed The Committee to Revive the Newspaper at Dorsey High School, Campbell was able to side-step the LAUSD bureaucracy and re-establish the journalism program in time for the 2006-7 academic year.  The Committee provided the funds needed for equipment, software, and printing costs, while Campbell and his students provided a enormous amount of hard work.  The result was six outstanding editions of the “Dorsey Gram,” a victory not only for everyone who worked on the paper, but also for the larger school community.

Now the challenge is to replicate the Dorsey experience throughout inner city Los Angeles, where high school students continue to lag behind their middle class counterparts in critical thinking and language arts skills.