Conversations with R.J. Dake raise questions
September 24, 2009 • Jeff Browne, KSPA; and Laurie Folsom, Lawrence Free State
Filed under Blogs, Conferences
For advisers who attended the 2009 KSPA conferences in Hays, Manhattan and Lawrence, one of the most anticipated sessions involved meeting with R.J. Dake, the consultant for the Internet Technology and Arts & Audio Visual clusters for the Kansas State Department of Education.
Chase County publications adviser Linda Drake and I sat at the front table with Dake all three days. Linda serves on the KSPA board as an Area 3 representative, and she’s also the JEA national secretary and on the NSPA board.
Lawrence Free State adviser Laurie Folsom set up her Flip camera for Wednesday’s session at KU and recorded the first 47 minutes. It was an interesting and somewhat intense three-quarters of an hour.
Here’s the article from The Chronicle of Higher Education I referenced during the session. In it you’ll read about the growing enrollment at schools of journalism around the country despite the current bleak job outlook. As I mentioned in the session, the current focus on journalism combined with entrepreneurship could predict a much brighter job picture for journalists in the near future.
Because Laurie and I had to leave to present educational sessions, you won’t see the next full hour, in which R.J. and several advisers continued their discussion.
As an organization, KSPA can have a strong voice in this discussion, and the Board will certainly discuss how we can communicate our concerns (and to whom), as well as our plans to help strengthen scholastic journalism at every school of every size in the state.
A central focus of KSPA’s activities over the next two years will be creating curricula and communicating with school and district administrators to make sure that what appears to be a money-conscious decision by the state (to reduce the number of programs receiving Perkins grant money) doesn’t become, in effect, a First Amendment issue for high school journalists and a teaching issue for the state’s schools of journalism.
If you’d like to help be a part of that conversation and the formulation of any and all subsequent messages put forth by KSPA, please contact me at jeffbrowne@ku.edu.
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For those of us who couldn’t attend the session with RJ, could someone let us know if there’s a possibility of continuing funding if journalism can be included in another cluster like IT or AV? At the end of Laurie’s video, Heather Lawrenz asks RJ if we should continue to pursue funding options or if the final decision has already been made. Unfortunately, the video ends before we get his answer. Any help in clarfiying this would be helpful!
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Kristin Baker Reply:
October 13th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
In a meeting with my associate superintendent, we conference-called RJ. His answers to questions about joining other clusters were vague. He said after the Lawrence conference, he had proposed that perhaps we be allowed to join in the IT cluster. I don’t think he knows whether that will go through or not. He gave very few direct answers except of course that the state does not plan to fund any course with the word “journalism” in the title.
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I cannot read the screen in the video. Did Mr. Dake have a powerpoint presentation? Could something be posted on the KSPA site?
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Jeff Browne Reply:
September 30th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
I don’t think he did.
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Had a chance to sit in on a college visit from Ringling College of Art and Design this week. I wrote down a Department of Labor statistic that was mentioned by the recruiter: DOL predicts a 52% increase in jobs in the Internet publishing and broadcasting sector.
I went to the DOL website to verify and I found a different number, 44%, but this is still significant.
Is this reflected in RJ Dake’s, I mean… “the state’s”, plan for CTE reform?
Here is the link to the DOL pg…
http://data.bls.gov/oep/servlet/oep.nioem.servlet.ActionServlet
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