MT. WASHINGTON, Ky. (LEX 18) — It can be hard to find your voice.
Being comfortable to make yourself known is challenging, especially for kids.
Kaden Vogel struggled with it when he first walked into East Bullitt High School.
"My freshman year, I was very antisocial. I had a hard time keeping conversation," Vogel said.
"Journalism, yearbook, all of that stuff opened my eyes to just how big the world is."
Vogel is among the roughly 100 students currently roaming in and out of Larry Steinmetz's journalism lab (affectionately known as Steinerville).
Yearbook, magazines, newspaper, camera work.
A seemingly endless amount of options for kids like Addison Macguire to find a creative outlet.
"My older sister was editor-in-chief of journalism my freshman year. I ended up choosing year book over journalism," Macguire said.
"I've always really enjoyed drawing and painting and all that. I was hoping to transfer it into something digital and eventually onto paper."
The program has come a long way over the last 26 years since Steinmetz first took it over.
He's quick to reminisce about the days of making things work through a single computer and A LOT of floppy discs.
“I tell these kids all the time, don’t take for granted what you have because other people paved the way. What we’ve built here is pretty special but it wasn’t always that way," Steinmetz said.
“I always say if you stick around, your verbal skills are going to exceed your peers. You’re going to be able to communicate and think in a way that high school kids can’t think."
This group takes pride in highlighting the important stories not only in the halls of East Bullitt but the surrounding community as well.
Current editor-in-chief Claire Schneider preaches keeping the human element in their work as a top priority.
"I found that I really liked writing about things and that became my favorite thing about it," Schneider said.
"It's very easy to just write about facts and statistics but the people are what make the story."
Their passion burns so bright, these students will go to any lengths to protect it.
It's led them to backing a grassroots initiative known as the New Voices Bill.
"We are the coalition to basically expand on the first amendment freedoms that we have at the school level and we're advocating to have student press freedoms in Kentucky," East Bullitt senior Milana Ilickovic said.
18 U.S. states have adopted the New Voices Bill, protecting student publications from censorship.
Kentucky is one of the newest states to effort the bill which Ilickovic proudly states has caught the attention of some state lawmakers.
“I feel like we play a bigger role than people know because the main issue with years prior is that people didn’t know about New Voices. This year, we’ve made ourselves more known," Ilickovic said.
"We’ve started an Instagram account. We’ve contacted countless senators. Emails, written letters. We’re just trying to get ourselves out there a little more and now that people know we exist, I feel like they’re starting to see that there’s no reason this bill shouldn’t be passed.”
No one is more proud than the overseer of it all, Mr. Steinmetz.
Watching his students take charge to secure their freedom of speech in and out of the classroom has validated what he has worked toward for almost 30 years.
"The stuff that we're doing is professional level journalism. The things that we cover, the topics that we cover. There's no difference between a professional journalist and what we do here and the way we cover our community," Steinmetz said.
