Welcome to Teens in Print’s COVID-19 Perspective Series
A first-person exploration of how the coronavirus outbreak has impacted Boston teens’ mental health, academic performance and families
Only days after Gov. Charlie Baker formally closed all Massachusetts public schools for the remainder of the school year, our students have written their third installments for the perspective series. In these pieces, our staff writers and editors explore how they adjusting to the new normal, and whether they expect things to get better or worse from here.
Read about mental health here.
Read about academics here.
Read about families here.
Read the stories students submitted for the second round, published April 14, about academics, family, and mental health by clicking on the hyperlinks.
Read more about Teens in Print below.
Teens in Print is Boston’s citywide high school newspaper, and this series will bring you the personal stories of 23 of our young staff reporters.
In three installments published biweekly, our students will describe how a particular part of their life has been impacted by COVID-19.
The focus of their stories falls into one of three categories: mental health, academics or families and finances. Some explore unexpected positives during the COVID-19 outbreak, such as bonding with family members now that everyone’s home, while others explore the hardships, such as the isolation aggravating existing mental health problems.
The series will allow you to read firsthand how our staff writers and editors are experiencing the coronavirus pandemic. Teens in Print is an inclusive program that strives to mentor and publish students from all backgrounds and career interests. We work with eight-12th graders who live in Boston and attend schools of all types.
Normally, we offer two tiers of student journalism afterschool programming during the spring. Our staff writers prepare one article for each edition of the paper and attend a weekly newsroom meeting. You can read their work at bostontip.com. Our editors participate in staff writer programming along with a weekly editor meeting, where they produce our podcast and many of our file photos. You can listen to the podcast with subtitles on YouTube, or on any of the major podcast distribution networks.
When Boston Public Schools announced all schools would close for six weeks — now extended to eight at the state level—we transitioned as much of our normal newsroom programs to virtual learning as possible. At the same time, we wanted to give our students a place to discuss the personal impact of COVID-19 in shorter pieces.
Our students have incredible stories, and we’re excited to share them with you.
Read about our students’ mental health here.
Read about our students’ academic performance here.
Read about our students’ families and finances here.
Read previous editions of the paper. Listen to our editors’ podcast.
Keep in touch with us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
Learn more about Teens in Print and our partner programs at WriteBoston.
Learn about our Summer Journalism Institute.
Learn about our school-year programming.
Teens in Print is a program of WriteBoston, a nonprofit literacy organization dedicated to promoting deep thinking through writing. WriteBoston offers professional development to teachers along with writing opportunities for students, built on the premise that powerful writing and thinking are inseparable. In the past year, WriteBoston programming for students and educators impacted more than 12,000 young people.