Florala High School is bringing broadcast journalism to their classrooms to provide students with another extracurricular activity.

“I went to a couple different conferences in Mobile and saw where a lot of schools with the same demographics as ours were doing programs like this,” Principal Max Whittaker said. “I am very excited to provide this for our students.”

The broadcast team now has 12 students from grades 9-12, and it will include one news anchor, cameraman, editor and reporter.

FHS teacher Michalyn Hope Hinson will be the sponsor for the group.

“They will do things like morning announcements, weekly interviews and Facebook videos,” Hinson said. “When we get used to all the equipment and have more experience we want to start live streaming different school events as well.”

Hinson was able to buy new equipment from a grant that she proposed.

“We were able to buy all of the equipment from the grant,” Hinson said. “Then we received all the applications from the students that were interested and now we are trying to get all of the students acclimated to the equipment.”

Hinson hopes to bring in professionals from the community to teach the students about broadcast journalism.

“We absolutely want to connect this class with the community,” Hinson said. “I also will be taking a group of the students to J-Day at Troy University this week so they can learn more about journalism.”

Hinson said that a lot of the students are very excited to start this class and some of them even have a little experience being behind the camera.

“Most of them have had speaking experience,” Hinson said. “But some are just trying it out. We are just glad to offer another thing for kids that aren’t interested in sports or things like that.”

Whittaker is looking to create a curriculum based around journalism so the students will be able to take it out into the real world.

“If we create a curriculum around this then we can offer this as an elective,” Whittaker said. “We can offer journalism, multi media, all types of classes and they will be able to take those skills into the real world.”