Laws, Ethics
& News Literacy
My approach to ethical journalism
In my first year on staff, Wingspan shied away from controversial topics. A story about why our community lacked diversity turned into a page of infographics showing what our town already knew.
When I took over, I worked with students one-on-one to develop their news literacy skills, doing interviews together, discussing the directions a story could go and reviewing other local articles covering similar topics.
Afterwards, my team quickly jumped into controversial topics like immigration, book bans, defunding public education, Turning Point USA, ICE and gerrymandering.
Because we’ve worked to develop everyone’s skills, I trust them to follow journalism ethics while producing insightful articles. The way I know if a controversial story will be insightful is by asking the question ahead of time, “What are you adding?” For example, gerrymandering is a broad topic. So when someone suggested it, I asked the question and they told me they were going to focus it on Missouri gerrymandering and explaining it to a student audience who may have never heard the term before.
In Wingspan, I ensure that everyone learns about their press rights and ethics so that we don’t shy away from stories that should be told.
Wingspan & Civitas learn about First Amendment rights
During my junior year, I was contacted by Civitas, a non-profit in St. Louis that hosts Model United Nations conferences and publishes a student-run newspaper, the Civitas Examiner. The organization reached out after reading my article, “Race in the Ozarks,” hoping to expand its coverage beyond the St. Louis area.
Another Wingspan staff member and I joined Civitas and wrote several articles for the Examiner. The staff member also traveled to St. Louis to participate in Civitas’ internship program in the summer, normalizing Wingspan students seeking outside classroom opportunities to develop their journalistic skills and knowledge.
Wingspan and Civitas Examiner students hear from William Freivogel, former Director of Southern Illinois University’s School of Journalism, on student journalists’ rights.
Civitas’s and Wingspan’s biggest endeavor was in September 2025. I had been working with William Freivogel on a project funded by the Pulitzer Center covering First Amendment rights in the Midwest. Freivogel is the former Director of Southern Illinois University’s School of Journalism and he previously reported for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the 1988 Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier case. Frievogel is also friends with Civitas’ founder Arthur Lieber.
Lieber and I arranged for Civitas students along with Freivogel to come to Nixa for a day. Both Civitas and Nixa student reporters learned about student press rights, journalism ethics and covering controversial stories from Freivogel and each other.
Investigative lessons at The School of the New York Times
The School of the New York Times Intro to Investigative Journalism class, 2025.
Last year, I won the News Writer of The Year runner-up from the Quill and Scroll International Society, along with earning a full scholarship to The School of The New York Times.
While you’re there you take a specific course so I picked Intro to Investigative Journalism with Michael Rothfeld, an investigative journalist at The New York Times and a Pulitzer Prize winner, and Seyma Bayram, an assistant professor at Columbia Journalism School.
Our final course project was creating an investigative pitch. My three person team’s pitch was about a potential land grab happening to indigenous Bolivian groups by the micronation Kailaasa. We stumbled on this topic after finding documents between the groups and Kailaasa, promising the micronation land for, what we believed, was too cheap. We reached out to an expert in land grabs and presented our findings. She pointed to signs on why it was likely a land grab and compared it to multiple land grabs in the past.
During this project, we also learned about FOIA requests, fact-checking and journalism ethics. A week into the project our team received a cease and desist letter from a member of Kailaasa. In a panic, we gave our instructor a copy of the letter to get his insights. He looked through it and our previous interactions with the person and said we were OK. We ended up getting an extra lesson on cease and desist letters.
Overall, the course and pitch were lessons that I brought back to Wingspan.
Building rapport with administration
Before we publish a Wingspan, we get it reviewed by Nixa High School principal Dr. David Kelly. I schedule our meetings two weeks in advance. In the meetings, we review every story, circling those that could be considered controversial.
Then, Kelly looks through the magazine on his own time. He reaches back out if he has any concerns, which is rare, and I meet with him a second time to discuss his concerns. This has only happened twice and in both cases the articles still got published with all the same content, just different language.
As editor-in-chief, I keep administration updated on our work while advocating for my team. Through these check-ins, Wingspan and the Nixa administration aren’t blindsided by each others’ actions.
In addition, building this rapport has led to other administrators being more transparent during interviews.
First Amendment as a Supreme Court justice
I became a Supreme Court justice for a week.
Last summer, at Missouri Girls State instead of doing my usual journalism work, I decided to apply my Constitutional knowledge. After a long day of interviews, I was chosen as one of seven girls to be on the Supreme Court and rule on a constitutionality case.
Our case was a citizen claiming that their rights had been infringed upon because her city made an ordinance forcing everyone to “show spirit.” If the girls didn’t show spirit, they were forced to go to “prison,” which was a stool in the corner of their lounge visible to everyone.
After 30 minutes of discussion, we decided on a 7-0 decision that the ordinance did infringe on First Amendment rights and that they needed to change the language.
While this experience didn’t directly relate to journalism it gave me a look into court rulings and how the First Amendment is applied.
Missouri Girls State Supreme Court getting sworn in during a joint assembly with Boys State.
Fighting for the First Amendment
NixaSABR participates in Break the Tape, a protest during Banned Books Week where students put caution tape on their books and backpacks for a week. Roughly 200 students participated in 2024 and 100 in 2025.
In eighth grade, I heard about book challenges in my school district. My first reaction was, “That’s dumb, it’s not gonna go anywhere.” But I was mistaken. Not only did the book challenges make it to the school board, books were banned from my high school’s library.
The book challengers pointed to concerns about adult content. The problem is that the books address issues on race, religion, and sexual orientation, so it’s not hard to connect the dots in terms of why these challenges were happening. I believe students need to have access to stories about people who don’t look, sound, or even live like them or their neighbors.
Since those initial book bans, I got involved by becoming a leader in Nixa Students Against Book Restrictions (NixaSABR), and supporting the freedom to read has become a big part of my life.
To bring about change in my community, I have spoken up multiple times at school board meetings. The first time, I knew that I wanted to leave a message, but each speaker was only given three minutes. So I devised a plan. Along with my speech I would wear a school-approved speech and debate shirt that said “Speak Up” on the back. I thought not only would everyone in the room see my message, there might also be a journalist there to cover the story. I was right.
The next day there were multiple news articles describing the student speeches at the meeting. Most were accompanied by a photo of my back with “Speak Up” clearly visible.
While that’s just one moment in my fight for free speech I’ve never lost sight of my main priority, my community. Our school still receives book challenges, but the school board hasn’t banned a book in over a year.
Last winter I got the opportunity to write an article for Gateway Journalism Review for a First Amendment project funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis reporting. The article was about my experience fighting book bans. And there was a quote in there that sums up my journalist views on book bans and censorship.
“Book bans go against American values. Banning books is a form of censorship that restricts open discussion, curiosity and free thought. As a journalist myself this scares me. Censorship in schools normalizes censorship elsewhere. If we allow book bans to become routine, it becomes easier for people in power to control what information gets out to the people.”
I fight for the freedom to read because I strongly believe in free speech, public libraries and understanding different perspectives.
Links to:
“Freedom To Read Is in Peril” Pulitzer Center article about the freedom to read by William Freivogel
Springfield News-Leader article with a photo of my “Speak Up” shirt