On April 8, 2025, five Leesville students spoke at the Wake County School Board meeting. They spoke along with many other students, bringing attention to an issue that student Journalism was set to face next school year.
High school newspaper programs around the county run their websites through WordPress. Some of the sites are run through School News Online, SNO. The Leesville Road High School website is run using WordPress.
“We’ve had a website since 2011, and so that means we have thousands of articles archived on that page from students who are journalists in the real world. It’s created a large platform for our school and the students, and the loss of the website endangers the student voice and our ability to produce our work,” said Sophie Key, Junior.
Key is a staff writer for The Mycenaean, who is training to run the website for the upcoming 2025-2026 school year. Key spoke at the school board meeting on how the removal of SNO is a key issue for many, and how Wake Counties safety concerns over SNO affect us.
SNO currently runs over two thousand news sites for K-12 schools, but due to an extension in the Cisco Umbrella, all websites run by SNO are not able to be reached by students and staff of Wake County, both on their school devices and on any devices on school campuses, due to security reasons.
Many students county-wide are affected by this and have decided to take action. These students banded together to speak cohesively at the school board meeting in an attempt to put forward better solutions than the ones previously presented to them.
“Wake County gave us Canva, Adobe Express, and Google Sites in place of WordPress, but these are not news platforms, and they don’t support the professionalism we strive for, “said Key.
These students were congratulated on their professionalism, hard work, and ability to provide solutions to this issue. Furthermore, the students gained public speaking experience while speaking out on an issue they feel is unfair.
On Wednesday, April 10, 2025, these students were met with ecstatic news. The school board extended SNO’s ability to run under the Cisco umbrella for one year. During that year, Wake County plans to do more research regarding the safety of the program.
“I am so glad that we got quick action, I didn’t know what was gonna come out of it, but I’m really proud of all the work the high school put in, and that we could actually do something,” said Alexis Engelson, sophomore.
Many of the students involved plan to take action again next year if needed. Students are currently celebrating their accomplishments, and continuing to work on articles for their websites.
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