Most Friday mornings Elder students look forward to the morning video announcements.

With renovations to the studio/Schafer center ENN’s big return has been severely postponed.  The Elder News Network has experienced great improvements in the last three years especially.

In 2017, it was nothing more than a roll up green screen and a camera.  Going into the 2018/2019 school year it was taken to the next level in a Schaeper Center classroom.  This gave the much-needed space but still held back our students.  There we had a painted wall as the green screen and two live news anchor desks as well as teleprompters and more advanced equipment.

Entering into the 2020 school year, we have seen yet again a large-scale improvement to a real studio along side the whole Schaeper Center renovations.

This includes a broadcast studio and production room separated by a glass wall.  With all this talk of the new studio, why have we not seen ENN yet?

The simple reason is that it is taking a long time to install the updated gear and let alone learn how to use it.  It is difficult to teach news equipment as advanced as what we have to high school students.

On Sunday, November 8, Mr. Fuell and many other students finished putting the final touches on the studio.  The last of the equipment was the “3 – 65-inch TVs mounted, 2 back studio lights hung from the Unistrut grid.  Final project is to hang the 2 new DMZ lights that give a field of depth to the anchors,” said Mr. Fuell prior to doing that Sunday.

Now that everything is in place and ready to be put to use, the next step would be to start ENN.  Before doing that, we have to look at Open House.  On Thursday November 12, Elder hosts their Open House where students of any age can come to see what Elder High is all about.

We have to be able to show the future Elder Panthers what they will be working with if they do so choose to attend their high school time here.  The biggest change to ENN this year is incorporating it in with the already existing journalism class.

Elder has had a journalism class for many years.  It was not until the 2020 school year that they made ENN part of that class.  Prior to this year, ENN was treated as a student run club/organization.  Anyone who pleased to help out could.  Now students will be able to work on ENN scripts and videos in class and it will be counted for a grade.

Although we have missed ENN thus far, its obvious to see that it is in reach.  With some hard work from the students at Elder High School and the Journalism team, we can all look forward to seeing ENN once again very soon.