Student Interns Populate Conference Daily Reporting Staff

From left to right: Brianna Sacks, Keren Yi, Gayane Minasyan, Lilac Peterson, Jay Goldman, Dahlia Peterson, Scott LaFee, Angelina Velasquez.

Over the past week, AASA has provided a comprehensive, multi-media report on a full array of activities at the association’s national conference in Los Angeles Feb. 21-23.

AASA’s Conference Daily Online has delivered more than 15 news stories and features each day on all facets of the big event, a daily photo gallery, audio and video clips, a lively Twitter feed and a conference blog involving posts from four AASA member superintendents daily. In addition, the site houses the links to PowerPoint presentations by more than 60 individuals who led topical sessions during the three days of the conference.

No other professional association the size of AASA provides such extensive, on-the-scene coverage of its major professional conference each year.

Serving as on-site co-editors this week were Gayane Minasyan, webmaster at AASA, and Jay P. Goldman, editor of AASA’s School Administrator magazine.

Francesca Martens

For the first time, most of the reporting staff consisted of student journalists from both the high school and collegiate ranks. Three interns came from University of Southern California: senior Francesca Martens, graduate students Angelina Velasquez and  Brianna Sacks. Three others are scholastic journalists, all juniors, at a magnet high school, the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies: Lilac Peterson, Dahlia Peterson and Keren Yi.

Also reporting all week was Scott LaFee, a freelance writer who regularly contributes to AASA. He works full-time for the UCSD Health Science Center.

Liz Griffin	Betsy Samson	Francesca Duffy

Editorial and web support was provided back home during the days of the conference from AASA headquarters by AASA staffers Liz Griffin and Betsy Samson and former AASA editorial specialist Francesca Duffy.

Lifetouch provided photo coverage and produced the daily video clips at the conference.