EXTRA! EXTRA! Rutland (VT) Herald picks up Heroes & Heroin In Bennington rap music video story! This David & Goliath tale of a handful of students taking on the NY Times in a battle for accurate reporting has now migrated 50 miles out from Bennington, VT. Now, Albany, NY affiliate television station is considering doing a story about this. Next stop, Boston, NECN and then we go national! Article published Jun 9, 2014 High school students make rap video with a message By Patrick McArdle STAFF WRITER BENNINGTON — A group of Mount Anthony Union High School students in the Quantum Leap program have created a video they hope will tell the world that not all the students in the Bennington area are using heroin. The students were responding to a New York Times article by Katharine Seelye printed March 5 that looked at how heroin use had spread to even rural areas like Bennington and Rutland. But they were outraged when the article quoted Trooper Wayne Godfrey of the Vermont State Police. “It’s in the high school. The kids are doing it right in school. You find baggies in the hallway,” the article said. Quantum Leap is a program that serves students, many of whom have had difficulties with traditional classes, and allows students to participate in designing their own education. The students in this year’s program worked together to write a letter responding to the article and that letter inspired student Austin Bourn. “It kinda started out as we saw the New York Times article. They talked about it in class. I went home, got my notebook started writing about it and decided to make something out of it,” Bourn said. Bourn said he had just intended to make “something cool” he could show his friends but after recording it on his phone, he played it for teacher Danielle Crosier. She connected him with a student at Bennington College who helped him record and edit the song over a two-day period. The other kids in the Quantum Leap class decided they wanted to make a video for the song. Bourn, who said he has been rapping for three years, thought that was a good idea. “If it’s just one person’s opinion, no one’s going to want to hear it. If it’s multiple people’s opinions that are actually the people being affected by it, then it has more meaning,” he said. Jennie Robinson, another student in the class, said the video had a message that was important, especially for students at MAUHS. “Bennington isn’t based off of heroin like The New York Times is portraying. It’s basically showing that they ruined a bunch of bright futures. There’s a part in the music video where kids are looking down and then they look up and smile. It’s supposed to show that they have a bright future. But the rap is saying that The New York Times took that away because who wants a kid from ‘Heroin High’ to go to their college,” said Robinson, who wants to be a nurse. The students brainstormed the concepts for the video together over three or four days, said student Jimmy Carr. The video was recorded in the students’ classroom, which is on the campus at MAUHS, over two weeks. It was posted on YouTube on May 22 and has gotten almost 4,200 hits. Student Jesse Hastman said the video turned out better than he hoped. “I thought, ‘This isn’t going to be all that much of a big hit,’ and then I looked at it and I’m like, ‘This is going somewhere. This is a lot better than I thought it would be,’” he said. Another student, Dylan Ross, said it made him feel good about himself. “It makes me feel we’re doing something more than just coming to school. When I’m in this class, it makes me feel that I can do something that I get notification from, that people notice it,” he said. Bourn said the video never would have happened without the Quantum Leap program. The students are now working with a locally based media and marketing expert, Jeffrey Grimshaw, who is talking with them about how to get the video — and their story — to spread across Vermont and the nation by using social media and marketing. He pointed out the experience was providing the students a “college-level education in multimedia and multimedia marketing.” The video can be seen at youtube/watch?v=80kRzrc-7CA
Posted on: Mon, 09 Jun 2014 13:54:59 +0000
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