COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW — When Ally Dolores was in ninth grade at Pace High School, in Manhattan’s Chinatown, her English teacher dropped a print newspaper in her lap. She’d never opened one.
“I was like, ‘Where did he get this from?’ I was so confused,” Dolores said. The teacher, David Rohlfing, had witnessed the school’s student newspaper, The Pacer, wither and die in the 2010s—but during the pandemic, after he was able to reanimate his disconnected students through a storytelling project, he had the idea to bring it back. He recruited Dolores, one of his best students. Four years later, Dolores, now a seventeen-year-old senior, is editor in chief. One of her ambitious recent stories detailed the experiences of Pace students who have endured attempted physical and sexual assaults in the blocks surrounding the high school. “I don’t believe adolescents should be in a community where they are targeted every day,” she said. “I wanted to put that out there for the Pace community.”
The piece generated buzz at the school after it was reposted on Instagram, and school administrators responded positively. Meanwhile, the Pacer newsroom of roughly fifteen students, who meet in a fourth-floor classroom during their eighth-period journalism elective, celebrated the article’s success.
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