Part 2 of 3 in Three Ways In, a series on the Community Media Archive: educational access.
In 1984 Tony Bennett came to Glenbrook South High School in Glenview, Illinois, to give a concert. Before he went on, two students from the school’s television station, Holly Firfer and Jim Anast, sat down with him to talk about his life and career. The school kept the tape: Tony Bennett Interview (12 min). Firfer went on to anchor and report for CNN, and Anast became a news reporter at WGN radio in Chicago.
That is the double job educational access does. School and college channels keep the record of a community’s young people: their concerts and plays, their commencements, their spelling bees. They are also where a lot of those young people first learned to run a camera, write a script and look into a lens. The Community Media Archive holds 345 educational access station collections, more than 350,000 videos and at least 18 years of running time. Every video linked below runs longer than three minutes.
Glenbrook South’s collection is a good place to see what a school station kept once it had one. There is the 1985 variety show, Under Construction (59 min), and there is a run of video yearbooks, such as the one for 1987 (55 min), in which students talk about homecoming and the football season. In 1991 the station recorded Paul Laurent performing the declamation that won him the state speech championship, Abbie Hoffman’s “Reflections on Student Activism” (8 min).
In February of that same year, Atkinson, New Hampshire televised the Atkinson Academy spelling bee (48 min). The host welcomes the TV viewers along with a full room, introduces all twelve finalists by name, and warns us they’ll be nervous.
College stations run real newsrooms. On March 3, 2021, CitrusTV anchors Oscar Offerman and Ricky Sayer opened News Live at 6 (29 min) at Syracuse University with the first known COVID-19 death of an SU student. Their colleagues reported on which dorm residents might qualify for a vaccine and on how campus tours were running that year. At Ball State, NewsLink Indiana anchors Tanner Holbrook and Sarah Lehman led their April 3, 2018 broadcast (30 min) with team coverage of that day’s storms and a tornado watch.
Younger students report too. Media students at Main Street Middle School in Soledad, California made a documentary about the construction of their own school (30 min). At Auburn University, student leaders from EETV, The Auburn Plainsman and WEGL 91.1 FM moderated the 2025 student government candidate debate (1 hr 19 min). And on the Seattle Colleges channel, Ethio Youth Media TV (58 min) covered the eighth annual Open Hearts Big Dreams dinner and auction.
The school channel lets every family see the show, including the relatives who couldn’t get a seat. Suitland High School’s theater department in Maryland staged Little Shop of Horrors (1 hr 25 min). In Arlington, Virginia, Taylor Elementary put on The Lion King (1 hr 19 min), and the link is to the Group B cast, because there were enough performers for two. Salmen High School in Louisiana presented The Evolution of Jazz (1 hr 21 min). Brownsville, Texas celebrated the Lopez Early College High School marching band (29 min), and Calhoun Community College in Alabama recorded its 2021 vocal recital (1 hr 22 min).
Educational channels also put teaching on the air for anyone who wants it. Southeastern Louisiana University’s channel produces full course lectures, such as the Earth and Space Science class on human-caused climate change (55 min). At the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Darrell Heath explains how to watch a meteor shower (12 min), down to bringing a red flashlight. Howard Community College in Maryland walks through its pre-electrical apprenticeship (28 min).
The kitchen counts as a classroom too. Mobile County Public Schools in Alabama made Cooking With Class: Salads (11 min), and in Lubbock, Texas, Chef Gooch shows how to make a dish his students served at the 2026 Texas ProStart Invitational (28 min): a reverse-seared pork chop with a potato rösti.
Colleges bring writers to their towns as well. Northwestern State University recorded Julie Kane, then Poet Laureate of Louisiana, speaking at the Vernon Parish Library (50 min) on why poetry matters in daily life. West Kentucky Community and Technical College streamed Ross Gay’s visit (58 min) for its community-wide read of The Book of Delights.
Some of the most important video on these channels marks a day a family will remember. St. Tammany Parish Public Schools in Louisiana recorded its 2014 adult education commencement (1 hr 14 min). Washington State University invited its classes of 2020 and spring 2021 back to Pullman for a commencement ceremony of their own (1 hr 15 min).
Tuskegee’s 2016 Martin Luther King Jr. birthday celebration (1 hr 15 min) featured a keynote by the civil rights lawyer Fred D. Gray. The Sioux Falls School District livestreamed the city’s 2022 Native American Day Parade (1 hr 16 min). Brownsville recorded its Special Olympics (29 min). Worcester Public Schools in Massachusetts made The Gift of Language (9 min) in Vietnamese for the families it serves.
Every one of these was recorded by someone who knew the people on stage, and often by a student who would be on stage next year. Forty years from now, somebody will go looking for their own graduation. I hope they find it.