When Jena Howie accepted her teaching post at Yazoo City High School, there was no student newspaper. Now that she’s in her third year, The Yazooan has been revived, and 40 students are involved with the publication through Howie’s journalism I and II classes.

Howie said it’s important to her to teach students why journalism matters and how powerful the field can be.

“Seeing the kids’ responses to seeing the first real newspaper, even compared to last year, this year where there was controversy and poetry and news and debate and opinion and all of these things, just their responses to seeing what their work could do was so impactful for them and for me and for the whole community,” she said. “Parents were coming to me saying ‘We love this, thank you for shining a light on x or y.’”

Howie said it’s important to show students that their voices matter.

“We had a band director that got fired in the first couple of weeks of school who came back and tried to steal the instruments, and we had a news story on it on the front page of the first newspaper of the year,” she said. “It was super controversial, and the principal got really mad and got on to students, and everyone was talking about it.”

Controversy is not something Howie and her students have shied away from in their fledgling newspaper.

“We brought light onto how we had to walk in a line to the cafeteria and sit with a teacher and with a class and be monitored and these were seniors,” she said. “[The writer] called it the ‘one man march to the cafeteria.’ She wrote about ‘what do we need to do to get this to change,’ and in that process of writing about it, publishing it and letting the whole school and community read about it, she was then thinking on the level of systematic change by asking what do we have to do to change this system that we hate.”

Howie said it’s important to give students the power that they often don’t have in schools.

“The power is in their hands to report and write on it, and they like it,” she said. “The students are doing it, and we’re writing stories that aren’t super critical and bashing, but they’re well-rounded. These are real issues. If you can’t read about it and be real about it then it’s proof that there is corruption.”

Being a part of the Mississippi Scholastic Press Association has helped Howie to establish credibility with her journalism program.

“It’s been a good support to be able to go to my principal and say, ‘We’re part of a state-wide organization for journalism, so if you want this to happen, we’re going to do it the legitimate way. We’re not going to just put out a paper and have no backing from anyone,’” she said.

Howie, who graduated from Baylor University with a degree in communication and journalism minor, landed at Yazoo City High School with through appointment from Teach For America, a national teacher corps of recent college graduates who commit two years to teach and to effect change in under-resourced urban and rural public schools.

“It is a rural, failing school,” she said. “My first year we were under state takeover and couldn’t do as much with athletics, and this year we’ve had to extend the school day because we’re a priority school. It’s definitely a high-need school.”

When Howie’s two-year appointment ended in May, she said she didn’t feel she was ready to leave.

“I fell in love with Mississippi in general,” she said. “I felt like there was a lot of work to be done on my end and in that community. I’m setting a standard for people who come after me.”

Howie said people don’t realize sometimes that TFA doesn’t have to be just those two years and said she’ll stay at Yazoo City High School as long as she feels like she should be there.

“I felt like all the work I put in last year and the year before to get a newspaper of any kind started, it wouldn’t be sustainable after last year — after this year, maybe,” she said. “I felt very committed too, if I’m going to work my tail off to start a journalism program to the point where these kids are essentially on their own producing a paper, I’m not going to just walk away from it and then when I’m gone it’s gone. It needs to be able to outlive my time here.”