Murrah High School is an award-winning high school journalism program in the state of Mississippi, and is this year’s MSPA recipient for best literary magazine. That magazine, The Pleiades, is the specialty of the students’ at Murrah, who lead the charge on the work, according to Sarah Ballard, teacher and Pleiades instructor.
“We spend the first part of the school year working on our writing, and then we spend the second part of the year publishing the magazine,” Ballard said. “And all the students, they do all the work. It’s all student generated material and art. They come up with the theme and the actual design. Everything is in their hands.”
For the process the students go through in developing Pleiades, student Zuri Wheaton was eager to share how it is a large contribution effort that is narrowed down to what content will fit.
“Our process for the lit magazine is that we have a certain amount of time where we allow anyone in the school to submit their pieces, which all have a chance to be entered into the magazine,” Wheaton said. “Our group goes through and analyzes each poem or writing to see if they fit with the theme.”
Ballard added on that the partnership Murrah has with an art program in the Jackson Public Schools is a key contributor to their continued growth and progress.
“We are very lucky we have a partnership with a special art program that is a part of Jackson Public Schools, named APAC Art,” Ballard said. “A lot of the kids in here are also in that program, so we have access to incredible visual art that really brings a lot of color and personality into our magazine. I think that’s partly been why we’ve had so much success.”
Another student, Courtney Brown, talked about how the usual work they are assigned to do in the club comes as a way to hone skills and keep the thought process strong.
“Writing doesn’t come easily to some people, and for me it takes a while to get into what I’m doing,” Brown said. “Most of the writing exercises that we do are very beneficial, and I would say that’s something that Mrs. Ballard really helps us with. Whether it was just a piece of writing or poem, it doesn’t really matter. It helped the brainstorming process. That’s a skill that we use a lot.”
Moving on to some of the challenges the Pleiades has faced, Ballard first talked about the work needed to get students involved. This includes finding times to meet, giving the students direct assistance, and a dedicated sponsor.
“One of the challenges of the lit mag not being a class, but a club is trying to make sure that all the students have a hand in producing the magazine,” Ballard said. “That’s why its so important to have a sponsor who’s here and dedicated to making sure we meet every week and helping the students. Also, I tend rely very heavily on my upperclassmen and then working to teach the younger ones. Then, when they become juniors and seniors, they can take on leadership roles.”
The students also have obstacles they face themselves. Take it from Twila Johnson, who shared that the toughest part is putting a topic together with the art they receive, or creating a new topic altogether.
“Our struggle with the lit mag is finding a topic, but also we have to correlate the art to the topic,” Johnson said. “And if we don’t have a topic, you have to make one based off someone else’s art. Another important part is going through to check and edit so we won’t have any errors.”
That work has been made easier on the students though, with the more recent integration of Canva into the classroom the last two years.
“Once we started using Canva to produce and design our content, that was huge,” Ballard said. “And that just happened for the first time two years ago. Before, we were struggling with Adobe InDesign, which is good but very hard to teach a new group every year. Canva was just a game changer.”
Above all other challenges, Ballard emphasized that funding was critical to the work that the Pleiades needed to do. She has been teaching at Murrah for over twenty years, it could recall back to when the program did not have the funding it sees now.
“I started sponsoring the Pleiades in 2009, and for many years it was always money,” Ballard said. “Funding was the biggest challenge for us because the school didn’t give us any money. We did fundraising, and we sold the magazines to try to recoup some of the money. But as we started to get recognition, because we were winning awards and doing work through scholastics, more and more alumni became interested. Eventually, we had a group of alumni who came together and decided their big gift would be creating a fund for the Pleiades that they raised.”
Throughout their time in the classroom, the students working in the Pleiades have learned many valuable lessons and skills that can reflect on growing themselves, not just a writers and artists, but as confident young people. Expression and finding themselves were key points they all shared:
“One of the things that the Pleiades helped me with is learning how to express my personal voice and showing that to people,” said student Austin Windham. “With speech and debate, its not a personal or emotional thing. So there’s not that level of connect. But here there is, and that definitely helped me develop into sharing more of my emotions.”
“I’ve learned a lot of new things, and something I didn’t know was how powerful writing is,” said another student, Haiti Navasasar. “It really brings a person to express themselves. I feel like since joining this club I’ve learned a lot about people, you can see small signs of what they believe in and how they work. We’re all different, and I feel like writing helps us express that.”
“Your best writing happens when you’re feeling what you’re writing about, so something that I’ve learned how to do is listen to music that really captures that emotion and enhances it,” said student Jacob Wings. “It makes it stay a little longer, to capture those emotions and keep them in the moment just long enough to get down what I need, which has really helped me with writing poetry.”
“Something I would like to note about the Pleiades is that its a very positive space that I have learned to hold very dearly to my heart,” said Courtney Brown. “It’s very judgmental free. It’s very therapeutic in my opinion. Because writing is a very sacred practice, and it really does require a lot of thought, rawness, and emotion.”
To conclude, Ballard talked about the commitment needed for the students, and how making their voice both heard and important is critical to their growth and development into young journalists and storytellers. And in that, they will representing not, just themselves, but their city of Jackson as well.
“One cool thing to mention is that the newspaper sponsor, she was our student and she was on the newspaper staff and the Pleiades when she was a student,” Ballard said. “I think that speaks to our group of students and teachers who are committed to making sure our students have a voice, and that they understand their voice is valid and important. It’s a lot of dealing with different things I won’t go into, but it’s worth it for them to be a part of the larger journalism community in Mississippi, and for them to represent Jackson. Our job is to give them the power, and it’s cool to see that come full circle.”
To learn more about Murrah High School and The Pleiades, check out the websites below.
