A room filled with balloons and sweets with the First Amendment written all over them were used to kick off the annual celebration of Scholastic Journalism Week.

Monday, Feb. 18- Friday, Feb. 22 will celebrate journalism at the educational level with the following themes:

Monday, Feb. 18- #MyCommunityMonday

Tuesday, Feb, 19- #RealNews

Wednesday, Feb. 20- #EverydayJournalism

Thursday, Feb. 21- #SavingDemocracy

Friday, Feb. 22- #NewVoices #StudentVoices

Saturday, Feb. 23- Sunday, Feb. 24- #TinkerAnniverisry- Celebrating the 50th anniversary of supreme court decision Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District.

From doing the morning announcements to trivia contests, the Newsstreak staff will be finding different ways to celebrate journalism.

Broadcasting teacher Emilee Hussack believes that celebrating and recognizing journalism is an important factor to today’s society.

“It is so important right now to understand truth and how to report on it and how to capture it. It takes years to become a good journalist, so the [sooner] we can start kids learning it is good practice,” Hussack said.

Along with knowing what journalism is and being aware of how it is used, Hussack stresses that any student has the ability to be part of journalism every day with the information and materials they view.

“[Students] take for granted that they don’t recognize how much work it is because there’s so much information and content created in the easiest ways. We all are content creators, but [there’s a] difference between good journalism and just information and entertainment [journalism],” Hussack said. “I think they also take for granted that they can also do it. They have the tools, they can access it to help them to be good journalist.”

Senior Evan Wood is a broadcast student who is constantly capturing videos of the school community. Wood not only incorporates journalism into his life through a mic and video camera, but also absorbs it through watching the news, and of course, keeping up with the high school newspaper. With his strong involvement in journalism, Wood believes that others are affected by journalism every day as well but are just unaware of it.

“I think journalism is important to everybody because it’s [about] getting to know everything that’s happening around you and being aware of everything that’s happening,” Wood said. “Journalism has one of the impacts out of everything that affects people’s lives. Millions of people watch the news, so that one little thing on the news, it might not seem like it, has a big impact [on their audience]. Lots of people might be changing their opinion slightly [because of journalism].”