Sophomore PSA winners announced at festival

Sophomores participated in a film festival and awards ceremony to celebrate the completion of their Public Service Announcements, or PSAs, the morning of May 23.
English teacher Mercedes Foster said that much of the sophomore curriculum is the study of rhetoric and learning how to communicate effectively with a specific audience. She and the other sophomore English teachers wanted their students to identify a need or find an issue that they were truly passionate about, then to create a 20-60 second PSA reflecting their desired message.
“It’s sort of like amplifying your voice in a meaningful way to promote change, whether that change is awareness, whether it’s action, whether it’s shifting perspective for your audience,” Foster said. “We thought it tied in very naturally with the service learning day because sophomore year is the year where your work in all your classes starts to be about the larger world. It gets away from a very individual and personal experience.”
As leaders of the sophomore service learning project, Foster and English teacher Debbie Hill chose to not require their students to focus directly on the sophomore service learning topic of discrimination.
“We wanted people to organically do what they are most interested in, with the understanding that almost everything has roots in, or affects some form of discrimination,” Foster said.
Hill said that the best PSAs were the simplest ones that had a clear message and sometimes an element of surprise.
“What a really good PSA does is make you feel and make you think,” Hill said.
Sophomores participated in a film festival on May 23 as part of their service learning project. They started the day by viewing selected PSAs in the Alan Harvey Theater and ended the day with an awards ceremony.
Foster and Hill, along with other teachers, administrators, and students met together to decide which PSAs to present to the entire grade. They choose 20 out of approximately 70 PSAs and kept the selections secret until the showcase.
Sophomore Claire Reichle said that she enjoyed coming together as a class to appreciate all of the hard work everyone put into creating their PSAs.
“It was really cool to see how creative people were and how the end product was so different between each PSA, even though the assignment was the same,” Reichle said.
After viewing the 20 finalists, students voted for winners in five categories: Most Inspirational, Most Creative, Most Thought Provoking, Best Acting/Voiceover, and Best Editing.
Sophomores Courtney Gao, Sophie Reynolds and Maret Sotkiewicz, won for Most Inspirational. Their PSA was about how technology is ruining people’s relationships not only with each other, but also with their environment.
“From the very beginning, we knew we wanted to show how minutes accumulate to someone missing out on their life on a long term scale,” Gao said. “[Making the PSA allowed me to] examine an issue really prevalent in me and my peers’ lives and use this a chance to be honest with myself about how I want to spend my time.”
Sophomores Bentre Nguyen and Matthew Turney’s PSA about energy conservation tied for Best Editing.
“In my opinion, video, text, and music are more effective than voiceovers, so that’s what we based the PSA on,” Nguyen said. “ Also, [we made sure that] the music fit the message and was synced to the text.”
Reichle said that each PSA was creative and effective in their own ways, making it difficult to pick a favorite.
“However, I really liked the PSA we watched about labeling, because the ending really struck me,” Reichle said. “It showed people’s labels on post-it notes covering their mouths, saying that a person’s label doesn’t tell their whole story.”
Gao said that in terms of how the PSAs connected to service learning, they shared elements like outreach and improving people’s lives.
“Our school’s approach to meaningfully linking the two was a step in the right direction, but still felt like a stretch,” Gao said. “With time, the process should mature into something really memorable.”
Hill said that in making the PSAs, she hopes that the sophomores have learned to understand how much work goes into creating a powerful, persuasive message with limited time. She hopes that they can go even further with the PSAs, possibly showing them to audiences beyond school so it becomes more of a service activity.
“Ultimately, I hope they will feel empowered that they can be active in their community even if its just sending a message,” Hill said. “This is their community. They have a voice. They should use it to talk about what’s important to them.”
The winning PSAs can be found online at tphnews.com.