Many new things have come to Tallmadge High School over the past few years, including the Monday Announcements which are new to the 2024-25 school year. The Broadcast class was started in the 2023-24 school year and has been run by teacher Julie Headrick since then. Morning Announcements go out over the PA system every first day of the week at the beginning of second block. The announcements let students and teachers know if anything important, such as events or meetings, is happening.

“One of the things we are trying to improve is communication. With the Broadcast class starting last year, by the end of the year, we were just trying to evaluate what we could do to get information out. Having a weekly schedule seemed like a good way to do it,” Headrick said.

The Broadcast class sends out a form every Thursday that teachers can fill out and submit their announcements to. If the teacher thinks it should be turned into a larger project, then Broadcast evaluates the information and decides if it should just be an announcement, or developed into a story for either Morning Meeting or the TGIF videos being sent out on Fridays.

Senior Alaina Wood is part of Broadcast and has made the announcements for one of the weeks already. She took Broadcast this year because it was different from all of the other classes she had taken before and wanted a change. But doing the announcements is not necessarily an easy thing for most people to do.

The biggest challenge with announcing is “kind of just the nerves. You gotta make sure you talk slowly and actually enunciate your words and know what you’re saying,” Wood said.

One of the problems with the announcements might be that they are not interesting enough or do not pertain to students enough for them to actually listen. Wood said that something to keep the announcements more interesting would be a good change, but she did not know what that change could be. Senior Cayden Lengel said that he does not really pay attention to them while junior Logan Hilker said that they seemed pretty boring and not super exciting.

Headrick plans to continue offering the Broadcast class for the foreseeable future saying, “I would love for enough students to sign up for it, then it would be offered both semesters and it would be a year-long class like Journalism and Yearbook.”

Currently, the class is not offered for the 2024-25 school year’s second semester, but Headrick intends to have the Journalism class continue the announcements in the spring. Headrick hopes that the announcements would be specific to Broadcast in the future.