Queens High School Develops Sports Media Program
By Randy Robertson, NYC and Hudson Valley Regional Storyteller
Bellerose, NY – The airwaves are full of talking heads screaming about sports. Seems everyone has an opinion about college and professional sports, and the ratings for many shows are good enough that top sports media personalities earn millions of dollars.
The popularity of sports talk shows is not lost on Patrick Kehoe and Bonnie Glass, teachers at P811Q in Bellerose, NY. Kehoe and Glass work in a District 75 school where students have various intellectual disabilities, and many of those students also have a passion for sports. In the past four years, the school has joined forces with Special Olympics New York and the adjacent Queens High School for Teaching, Liberal Arts and the Sciences to develop a thriving Special Olympics Unified Sports program.
In Unified Sports, athletes with intellectual disabilities and students without disabilities collaborate and support each other during athletic competitions and other school-wide events. P811Q offers Unified basketball, Unified flag football, and Unified cheer.
This year, Kehoe and Glass thought they would push the boundaries further and build a sports media program. All spring, four students – Jonothan, Malakai, Afnanullah and Dior – stayed after school on Tuesdays to produce a sports talk show by interviewing fellow student athletes.
The show is a work-in-progress. “We’re figuring it out as we go along,” Kehoe said. “We were trying to get kids who were not involved with our teams to stay in our after-school program. I’m a big college sports fan, and at most colleges the athletic departments have social media teams and following them on social media is a great way to tell stories and publicize the athletes.”
The P811Q Sports Media program is more than just a few teenagers sitting at their desks while a camera rolls. Kehoe, Glass and Peggy-Ann Dumas set up a green screen in the hallway, add tables and a laptop for each media personality, and they complete the look with a Special Olympics New York table coverlet. They also set up a ring light for proper lighting, and use a tripod stand and a mobile phone camera to record the shows.
Glass said she helps the students utilize common video editing software to edit the videos and add content to the green screen. Finally, the edited videos are shared on social media. You can find the shows at @p811Qsportsinfo on Instagram.
“This program has been amazing for our students,” Assistant Principal Nicole Zurita said. “I wanted the teachers to explore and figure it out. Bonnie, Pat and the students collaborated. I’m all for it. I really love it, and you see their personalities really come out.”
Kehoe said that although the program started with a small group of interested students, it’s already gaining traction. There have been as many as nine students involved at one point or another, and the unified sports programs are now close to 25 athletes, per Kehoe.
“The posts on social media are helping with recruiting,” Kehoe said. “Kids are joining who hadn’t previously joined unified sports. They want to be interviewed too. It’s rewarding seeing the content that they put out. The kids come into school, at lunch they talk about who got interviewed, and show each other when they get interviewed. They’re so proud of it. We even get emails from parents saying the student came home and set up the TV and showed it to the family and was so proud of it.”
As the semester rolled along, Glass said the students started to use graphic design software to create flyers about the sports media program. The flyers were printed and posted in the school’s hallways to help spread the word about this unique and growing opportunity.
Many students with intellectual disabilities can find it difficult to communicate and engage with peers, the teachers noted. Having a topic such as Special Olympics Unified Sports presents an opportunity for students to talk to each other, and that’s a huge win for everyone involved.
“The best part is when they’re improvising and just talking to each other,” Glass said.
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