To the Green Pride staff,

I can’t believe my time on the staff is over. I have spent the last three years cranking out web stories and coming up with story ideas for the print issues, all while balancing work for my other classes. It was stressful at times, and I sometimes felt discouraged, but nonetheless it has been the best part of high school for me.

At first it seemed impossible to come up with ten story ideas every month within a small, quaint school with little drama or scandal. But then it became easier as I discovered all of the talented, unique students worthy of feature stories.

My first ever story was about the three foreign exchange students we had my sophomore year. It was my first taste of interviewing complete strangers and having to write in the standard journalistic style. It wasn’t too long after that that I realized I wanted to be a journalist. I fell in love with getting to dive into the personalities and opinions of my peers. I even loved having to stay unbiased when I had a strong opinion about something.

I’ve been through a few different staffs, yet this one is unlike any other. Everyone is calm, mature and hardworking. We had no problems this year coming up with story ideas or getting stories in on time, despite the numerous snow days. Our Editors-in-Chief this year took more risks and made more positive changes to the publication than any staff before. Our section editors went above and beyond with page designs and produced some of our best pages. Our new staff reporters were eager to take on challenging stories and even learn a thing or two about page designing themselves. Finally, our video crew not only made great videos, but a couple of them even created their own podcast, the Green Pod.

Even in moments when I felt discouraged as a student journalist because of criticism over our stories or when I couldn’t think of groundbreaking story ideas, this staff was so hardworking and dedicated that I felt I owed it to them to keep going. Thank you all for constantly reminding me why I love journalism: because of the people behind it.

With love,

Clara Sloan, Web Editor (for the last time)