Students at SHS have been given a new opportunity to express their voices: a podcast club. Led by four English teachers, Julie Breeden, Brent Bockleman, Jacob Fritz and Mike Klopfenstein, the club will allow students to tell their stories through a new platform.

¨We call ourselves the Story Tellers, it’ll be interesting to see what sort of stories we have,” Bockleman said. “I think a lot of people don’t consider or even think about a lot of these things.” 

This club will allow students to bring in stories of their interest to discuss. The club will record stories and put them up online for others to listen to. According to Bockleman, the club won’t have any topics that are avoided. The sponsors want to bring new topics and stories to light in a new way. 

According to Breeden, each teacher brought in a different aspect that could help out the new club. Breeden and Bockleman will bring in  their prior knowledge from their AP Literature classes, Klopfenstein will provide his journalism knowledge and Fritz will bring his technical expertise.
Breeden and Bockleman both say that the stories being told and discussed would be up to the students and what type of interesting things they could pull out of the news, life at Southport and student interests. 

“We want it to be student driven and we don’t want to give them topics, you have to go out and explore this or you have to go out and research this,” Bockelman said.

This is the first year for the club so not everything is set in stone. When the podcasts are updated, up to ten stories will be released.

“It will be recorded and posted for students to listen to later, we’re not exactly sure how we’re going to format a page yet, this is a new thing and we’re kind of finding our way around that,” Breeden said.

The club received a grant through the Perry Education Foundation and it covers equipment such as voice recorders, microphones, headsets and covers subscriptions to services to allow students to use music and a software program for editing audio according Breeden. 

The club has been given a room in the recently closed-off hall, commonly known as the  “ghost hallway.” Students in the club will have access to it when recording and having work sessions. The room will contain computers for students to edit their stories and all the equipment to record the podcast.

The call out meeting will take place on Sep. 12. Regular meetings will begin taking place in the middle of the week. The first several meetings will be about finding students’ strengths, chemistry with others and past experiences.  

“We’re hoping to have a fair amount of kids interested,” Breeden said. “It’s been encouraging when I’ve talked to my students in my classes about (the club) and every class has had several kids who thought this might be a thing they would want to do. I hope we can put many stories out there, the more you have, the more you can do.”