“Dear Reader, We are happy to present to you the first edition of the middle school newspaper, ’The Clark Street Journal’. We want to start a new tradition and we feel that this is the first step we have to take in order to change history at Parker,” current seniors Marcelo Pereira-Webber, Ian Shayne, and Oliver Marks wrote five years ago in the first issue of “The Clark Street Journal.” This spring marks five years of the publication. 

“The Clark Street Journal” was started in 2015 by Shayne and Pereira-Webber. “We first came up with the idea, I think, in the cafeteria during lunch one day,” Shayne said. “I wanted to bring a middle school newspaper to Parker because one didn’t exist, and I was really excited to work on ‘The Weekly,’ but we couldn’t yet.” Shayne and Pereira-Webber pitched the idea during the winter of their seventh-grade year to Intermediate and Middle School Division Head John Novick, who had them talk to former Intermediate and Middle School Dean of Student Life Siobhan Allen. Allen shared with Shayne and Pereira-Webber that seventh-grade English teacher Kate Tabor was the former faculty advisor to “The Weekly” at the time. 

“She took time out of her schedule every Monday to make this work,” Shayne said. “She knew what she was doing, and so once we got Ms. Tabor to become our faculty advisor, it was really easy from that point forward because she did all the printing and layout.”

The paper was named “The Clark Street Journal” based off of “The Wall Street Journal.” “I thought that sounded better than ‘The Webster Street Journal,’ which was what my dad thought it should be called,” Shayne said. 

Since 2015, “The Clark Street Journal” has published six to eight issues a year. The club continues to meet on Mondays at 7:30 a.m. each week. “I think it’s really great to see people show up on Monday mornings,” Tabor said. “It feels good and it feels like there’s a place for a community of writers in the middle school.”

Shayne did not expect “The Clark Street Journal” to continue after his eighth-grade year. “It feels like we have this legacy that we’re leaving behind, and I didn’t think it would last this long,” Shayne said. ”I didn’t even think we’d be able to keep it going, and it’s incredible that not only has it survived middle school for us, but it’s still going on.”

“The Clark Street Journal” continues publishing each fall. “I have always had one or two students that started in sixth grade who wanted to keep coming back and then they did,” Tabor said. “And so I’ve never been concerned, as I left at the end of the year, that there wasn’t going to be someone back the next year.”

“The Clark Street Journal” focuses on writing pieces about the middle school and reviews. The first few pages of the publication usually have news articles. The middle has features and reviews on movies or books, and the back page has word searches and sudokus. “We need to give them platforms to think and write and express themselves as young adults,” Tabor said. “That’s why I think the Middle School paper continues to be important because I think if a middle schooler really wanted to write for the Upper School, they would feel out of place there or they would always feel like the little kid there.”

This year, “The Clark Street Journal” has published six issues. The staff has about eight students working on each issue for a cycle of around five meetings. “We’re not breaking any news, but this has been like a great outlet for me to start writing before “The Weekly,” and I think people do read it, and I do get to showcase my work in some way,” eighth-grader and Editor of “The Clark Street Journal,” Harry Lowitz said. “I get excited when we get the new issue, and it’s something that I’m proud of and I can point at it and say we did that.”

Shayne, Pereira-Webber, and Marks wanted to start a tradition when they created “The Clark Street Journal.” Lowitz, who has written for the “The Clark Street Journal” for three years, thinks that it will last many more. “In another five years, I would hope that there’s still Middle School students who are excited about journalism,” Lowitz said.

Many students who write for “The Clark Street Journal” continue to write for “The Weekly” in high school. “The Clark Street Journal definitely gave me the confidence to contribute well in “the Weekly” because I had written articles and improved my writing skills,” Shayne said. 

“I’ve seen that there’s a real joy when kids see their writing published and they want to do more, that’s my goal,” Tabor said. “I found that there’s always a handful of kids that keep moving up into the Upper School and keep working on journalism, and I always feel that that’s gratifying when I see that they liked it enough in Middle School to keep doing it.”