I have walked the halls of this school for about 3 years. Give and take the Covid years for taking away a quarter of my sophomore and my whole junior year. I’ve been on The Pacer for 7 semesters out of the 8 in those four years of attending and I think it’s taught me a lot. The kids in The Pacer that started with me, watched me grow from the short-haired, nervous, socially awkward kid into the majestic man I am today. 

My days at RMHS were made or broken by this class. Freshman year was my first year finding out I was a better writer than I thought. I could write a story in 15 minutes and then talk with my friends for the rest of the block. It was a class that made me learn a lot and going into sophomore year I had started to hit my groove. 

We lost our old journalism teacher, Ms. Deberge, and gained our current journalism teacher, Ms. Lussow. It was a weird change for a kid that was already comfortable with the last teacher but Lussow was a nice surprise. She set us up tall with a nice room to work inside in A101 and gave us the reins to do what we want to do. It was a fun year with a lot of well produced stories and more laughs. Then Covid hit. 

The end of sophomore year and Junior year was a wash. With not a lot to write about and no chance to make an actual newspaper it was hard to do really anything with the news section of a newspaper. 

So that comes to this year. Senior year is sentimental. I was the same kid that sat in the room listening to my teacher tell me about different ways to write and different stories you can do. As for the program itself, it’s in good hands. I mean for losing people like myself and Eli Morkert, it’s going to be an uphill battle. But with kids like Lucien Harris and Charlotte Peterson building on what this program has already done is huge and Lussow being the teacher of this class helps a bunch. 

She’s pushed me to do bigger and better things and put me in charge of things I should have not even been close to. These kids don’t have to deal with the constant beratement I gave when Laiken Lockley was here or the loud obnoxious music connected to Marianne Schraeder’s phone, blasting out of the projector. They have a lot ahead of them and am excited to see what they have in their arsenal.