For a second straight year, Ojai Valley School’s journalism program has been recognized as among the best in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties after students earned top awards Friday for feature writing, news writing, sports writing, and news photography.
OVS also earned third place in the sweepstakes category for overall excellence in high school journalism at the Tri-County Journalism Educators’ Association competition held at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.
This year, 10 OVS students were among a record field of 182 students from 16 high schools who competed all day in live writing, photography and layout design contests. They are unable to receive coaching from teachers or mentors.
At the end of the day, junior Daphne Psaledakis won first place in the feature writing category.
Seniors Emmy Addison and John Olivo earned second place in news writing and sports writing, respectively. Junior Kai Lin earned third place in news photography. Seniors Charlie Coe and Keaton Shiffman earned honorable mentions in news photography and sports writing, respectively. Seniors Kermitt Davis, Wei Wei Wang, Shelly Xu, and junior Amir Podoswa also participated.
In late May, Daphne, John, Shelly and Keaton went on to take top awards at the Ventura County Star’s annual journalism competition. Those awards were presented for sports writing, featuring writing, video production, and for the school’s revamped online new site, On The Hill.
“I’m so proud of every member of the journalism crew,” journalism advisor Fred Alvarez said. “We may be small, but boy are we mighty.”