Thank You Principal McKinney

Dear Principal John McKinney,

Okay, that was too formal — we all know that to us, you’re McKinney.

When our staff heard you accepted the position of Director of Family Services for the district, we boxed up our sorrows — to be reopened later — and instead promptly posted the news to our site.

The story was written, converged and posted — our job was complete. But to us, your new position doesn’t just merit a news story. It merits a thank you, directly from the Harbinger staff to you.

The newspaper staff in Room 521 doesn’t just see you as our principal. You’ve been an interviewee for a story concerning the March for Our Lives movement, the detrimental flu outbreak this past winter and our district’s updated school security plan. You’ve been the subject in the dominant for our Lancer Day photostory. But most importantly, you’ve been one of our biggest supporters.

Not every journalism program has the supportive principal we lucked out with. We’ve traveled to conferences around the country — with you as a chaperone, we might add — listening to horror stories from student journalists about dealing with their administration.

They have told us about their principals who deny students the chance to report on any scandals within the school. They have told us about their principals who condemn the paper for printing political opinions. They have told us about their principals who criticize the publishing of stories over controversial topics such as drug use and gender identity within their buildings.

Our experiences couldn’t be any more different. It’s funny to watch other student journalists’ shocked faces whenever they see our front pages covered with Juuls and Xanax.

Sure, most principals would be willing to interview with journalism students for a story reporting on their school’s recent service award. But not every principal would agree to be interviewed for a story about a sexual assault allegation or invite a new source useful to our story to the interview.

Your office door is always open to our staff writers. You laugh when we ask if we can record our interviews — you know the drill all too well. We come in with a list of 10 questions and after hearing your answer to just one, you’ve somehow already answered the remaining nine.

We feel you understand the drastic ways you are helping out our staff every time you retweet one of our stories to @smeoffice, or push back a meeting so we can interview with you. But there are some things you might not know.

Every time you spend 20 minutes interviewing with us at 8 p.m. on deadline, you save us from publishing a blank page in our issue. We always leave your office with 15 new source ideas of people that will elevate our credibility and give us relevant information for our piece. It takes us 30 minutes to decide which of your many quotes is the best of the best for our story — don’t take this as complaining, we love it.

We’re all sincerely grateful for the time you take out of your day to sit down and talk with us, but it’s the things you say off the record or after your posed picture is taken that leaves the biggest impact on us.

The time you walked into the J-room solely to tell one of our writers how great she did on a piece she just published showed that her 3 a.m. bedtime and five hours of transcribing during the week was somehow worth it.

You gave one of our photographers a reason to stay out on the sidelines to capture the moments of a freezing football game when you offered her your handwarmers.

Even though one of our video boys had never had a true conversation with you, you took the time to stop him in the hall and praise his dedication to the Harbinger, since you always saw him with a camera in his hands.

And no one could forget the time you bought our entire staff pizza after you finished reading the “best Harbinger issue ever.”

No matter the topic or size of the story, your support in our program and your willingness to work with each piece we publish sure makes our job easier. We also realize how it makes your job harder. There are times when you receive a bulk of the phone calls and emails about stories or photos that should actually be directed at us.

So thank you for every time you didn’t shy away from our program when you received flack from other administrators for our Juul story. Thank you for encouraging our Journalism 1 kids to take on a story about the Jane Elliot assembly, even when you received hundreds of emails from concerned parents over it. Thank you for not making us cut our story over Xanax, but instead giving us the contacts of every SRO in the building to help with our research.

Next year, we will be bombarding Dr. Scott Sherman with texts asking him to interview in the late hours of the evening. You won’t be sitting in front of us in the conference room at the beginning of the year as we talk about our goals for the newspaper. But just know that the legacy you are leaving behind on the journalism program is larger than the stack of 1600 newspapers we leave in your office every other Monday.

Good luck in your new position McKinney, we’ll make sure to send you a copy of every issue next year.