The Columbia Scholastic Press Association (CSPA) is pleased to announce that Tracy Anderson has been named the 2026 National High School Journalism Teacher of the Year. The 2025-2026 school year marks Anderson’s 26th year as a journalism adviser.
CITATION
Tracy Anderson has taught for 29 years and has served as a student publications adviser for 26 years. In her current role at Community High School in Ann Arbor, Mich., she advises The Communicator Online and The Communicator Magazine, The Midnight Sun yearbook, and VOICE literary + arts journal, and the podcast Kids These Days.
She chairs the school’s English department and runs the school’s converged media program, which consists of four different classes. In this environment, students are encouraged to collaborate and share knowledge across publications and levels of experience, which fosters self-sufficiency, teamwork, and leadership. Said Anderson, “From Day 1, new students are immersed in the full experience of being in a newsroom and working as reporters. Our mission is to tell the stories of every student in our building, and our goal each year is to interview every one of the 500 people in our school. Building trust is at the heart of our journalism.”
Anderson encourages her students to be the key decision makers in the publications they run, and they have tackled difficult topics ranging from constitutional rights, immigration, food insecurity, police violence, and more. “I encourage students to take risks and try new things, and I also try to be a role model in standing beside them and doing the same. I am not afraid of trying something and not having it work out. My journalists and I would not be where we are today if we didn’t bring this exploration and risk taking into our work.” Said retired Community High School English Chair Judith M. DeWoskin, “Tracy does not write editions of The Communicator. She incentivizes, mentors, guides, cultivates, and trains a large number of students who envision, write, organize, and design each edition. That is an important difference. It exemplifies the ideals of teaching, and it leads to publications that are deeply informed by student interests, understandings, and capabilities, while observing the critical tenets of journalistic discipline, integrity, and understanding of [the] audience.”
Anderson believes that giving the students the tools they need to become better journalists enables them to produce their best work. “There has been one time in the past 26 years when my students have been told that they couldn't write about something: mental health. Our dean at the time told them they couldn't write any articles about the topic; once that happened, I was in a position where I couldn't advise my students on what to do next. Luckily, I had already taught them about Tinker, student rights, my role as an adviser (pre- and post- censorship) and the Student Press Law Center. My students knew exactly what to do. Long story short, they ended up writing an article for the Sunday OpEd page in the New York Times. It was called "Depressed, but not Ashamed." In addition, they were on [NPR’s] Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. We all learned a lesson about the power that student journalists hold.”
Anderson and her students have won numerous national and state awards, and she has been active in several educator groups currently and in the past in Michigan and nationally, including JEA and the Michigan Interscholastic Press Association. In addition, both she and Community High School journalists have won numerous national and state awards for both overall publication excellence and individual achievement, including Crowns from CSPA, and multiple Gold Circle Awards. Anderson was previously recognized as a Distinguished Adviser in the CSPA National High School Journalism Teacher of the Year competition.
As Teacher of the Year for 2026, Anderson would like to “advocate that student journalists have an essential role in capturing and recording our national history through stories in their community. As students across the country document these stories, we will create a living archive of our nation’s evolving history…Is this work challenging? Yes. Is it necessary? Absolutely. Is it worth it? Always.”
In addition to Anderson, CSPA named the following distinguished honorees:
2026 Distinguished Advisers
Jenny Creech, St. Mark's School of Texas, Dallas, TX
Larry Steinmetz, Bullitt East High School, Mount Washington, KY
2026 Special Recognition Advisers
David Cutler, Brimmer and May School, Chestnut Hill, MA
Carrie Rapp, Lindbergh High School, Saint Louis, MO
2026 DISTINGUISHED ADVISERS
Jenny Creech, St. Mark's School of Texas, Dallas, TX
"In a world of influencers spouting nonstop opinions online, teaching fact-based research and reporting to our student-journalists matters more than ever."
Creech has served as an adviser to the publications at St. Mark’s School of Texas full-time since 2022. She advises the Marksmen yearbook, ReMarker newspaper, the smremarker.com news website, and Focus Magazine, a specialty magazine that runs 2-3 times a year. She also teaches a year-long Beginning Journalism course to students interested in joining one of the publications. She has long taught journalism workshops and also taught sports journalism at the University of Houston. Before becoming an instructor, Creech spent 20 years as a journalist at the Houston Chronicle and the New York Times.
Creech works with her students to be the voice of the student body. “We are fortunate to work with an administration that does not review anything before publication, and my students take their responsibility to be a voice of this community seriously.” Creech and student journalists have won multiple awards for their work, including national awards, such as CSPA Crowns and NSPA Pacemakers.
Said Creech, “Our journalists are not afraid to tackle a challenging topic that will spur conversations on our campus…It’s really important to teach our students that the goal of a journalist isn’t to amplify his or her voice, but that of his or her community…in a world of influencers spouting nonstop opinions online, teaching fact-based research and reporting to our student-journalists matters more than ever.”
Larry Steinmetz, Bullitt East High School, Mount Washington, KY
“Not a week goes by that a student doesn’t reach out and tell me how they used the skills they learned on my staffs in the courtroom, operating room, or doctor’s office. What we’re truly teaching is higher-level thought and communication.”
Steinmetz has taught at Bullitt East High School since 1999, and started advising the student publication the next year. He wrote, “In 2000, my students and I resurrected the Livewire as an eight-page rag, printed on the copy machines at school and run every Friday of the school year. It transformed my career.” Livewire is a hybrid publication, with a strong online presence: Steinmetz reports that it has “more followers on Twitter than there are people in our school. He says, “We are always aware of our larger community when we produce our magazine. As a growing community, we keep people aware of the changes and opportunities that pop up seemingly daily…We cover every topic with compassion and a dedication to truth in storytelling. That has earned us the trust and leeway to cover what we have in my tenure.” Steinmetz has also advised the school’s yearbook, Endeavor, since 2004.
In addition to student publications, Steinmetz created a capstone internship called Charged Media that places elite students from his journalism and yearbook classes in a program that targets small businesses in our community and reaches out to offer assistance. “We have helped area businesses create logos, shoot commercials, write copy for their websites, launch social media and create menus. In short, we look at their business and advertising model, find weaknesses, and target ways to improve their strategies.”
Bullitt East’s publications also serve the greater community. “I tell my kids to be the main source of news for our town. I talked about how thin [the local publication] Pioneer is stretched. We exceed them in manpower and can tell a greater volume of stories than they can. Every high school newsroom should approach their publication in that manner. It leads to a greater degree of professionalism and gives immediate buy in for students. I educate them on attaining press credentials and being in the rooms that matter. I educate them to know that they are professional media and long as they ethically present themselves as such, people will take them at face value. That’s what trust in journalism is.”
2026 SPECIAL RECOGNITION ADVISERS
David Cutler, Brimmer and May School, Chestnut Hill, MA
“I am truly a fly on the wall, intervening only when students have questions about ethics or journalistic practices. It took tremendous work to get to this point, but it’s absolutely beautiful to behold.”
Cutler has taught student media since 2008, first helping students launch online student news site The Falconer at Palmer Trinity School in Florida. In 2014 he started teaching at Brimmer and May School, where he began advising and helped students launch The Gator, a student news website, which has won numerous national awards, including CSPA Crowns and Gold Circles, and NSPA Pacemakers.
Cutler’s advising philosophy is to give The Gator journalists the authority–and responsibility–of their newsroom. Said Cutler, “I ask students to refer to the course as the newsroom instead of a class, since it is entirely student-run, and thus requires them to show greater ownership and agency.” He adds that now that his primary goal is “to be as invisible as possible, and I empower reporters and editors to tell me to back off when I am encroaching too much on their terrain. For instance, I recently suggested coverage of a basketball player who just scored 1,000 career points, and the sports editors took me aside to say, ‘We’ve got this.’ Indeed, they did have it, and are working on a large, multimedia piece about the star player. When my students feel confident enough to tell me to trust them, it fills me with pride, even as I am upset with myself for undermining their judgement.”
Part of The Gator’s success is that the newsroom functions as a production environment where students learn on the job. “I often explain how I prefer this method, comparing it to Driver’s Ed: most of what you need to know you learn by experience, not just in a classroom. If you walked into The Gator, especially during the first few weeks of a semester, you would see experienced reporters and editors paired up with new recruits. Rookies are required to shadow their buddies and undergo one-on-one training with veterans who review every facet of the publication with them. Depending on how quickly new recruits advance, this structure allows greater flexibility for them to grow and cover stories at different speeds.” Cutler frequently shares his experience, expertise, and point-of-view in publications such as Edutopia and C:JET.
Carrie Rapp, Lindbergh High School, St. Louis, MO
“I feel that the biggest issue facing scholastic journalism is training, hiring and retaining qualified journalism advisers.”
Rapp has taught media at Lindbergh High School for 12 years, advising the yearbook Spirit, and Sports Broadcast, whose students produce a monthly broadcast, the Green and Gold Show, which covers each level of sports at Lindbergh and produces social media content covering Lindbergh athletics. Her students have won numerous state and national awards, including CSPA Crowns and Gold Circles, as well as NSPA Pacemakers.
Rapp has instated prerequisites for publication staff, providing them with journalism training and knowledge of resources such as the Student Press Law Center for questions of media law. This enables them to approach content production and decision-making with the right tools. Said Rapp, “Our student publications are run by groups of dedicated students who work on all aspects of the yearbook and broadcast. All students brainstorm coverage ideas, take photos and video, design, write and edit. The editorial board creates content in addition to editing and proofing spreads and videos.” She adds that the editorial board is “responsible for making all content decisions,” and “final content decisions and responsibility of action on content decisions shall remain within the responsibilities and power of the student editorial board.”
Journalists at Lindbergh work hard to understand the challenges other students face. “The coverage which had the most impact on our school community last year was the ‘Through It All' spread, which highlighted specific student stories of struggle,” explained Rapp. “The verbal theme was twofold: ‘We’ve been through it all,’ and “The wait is finally over.” The Editors-in-Chief wanted to make sure that while most of the book was celebratory of the wait being finally over, [they] were acknowledging that in many ways, students were still ‘going through it.’ The main profile features a student battling lymphoma, while the smaller profiles address sports injuries and a student's struggles with mental health. After seeking out other student stories, the staffers also included a small mod with other aspects that high school students often struggle with, such as grades, breakups and issues with friends.” One of the students covered on this spread said the coverage made them “feel seen.”
The awards will be presented at the CSPA Spring Convention at Columbia University in New York City on Thursday, March 19, 2026. CSPA wishes to thank the Dow Jones News Fund for their continued support and this year’s judges.
The National High School Journalism Teacher of the Year Awards program is managed and sponsored by the Columbia Scholastic Press Association of Columbia University in the City of New York and co-sponsored by Dow Jones News Fund.
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The Dow Jones News Fund is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that promotes careers in journalism in the digital age. Our vision is robust news media staffed by well-trained, innovative journalists who reflect America’s diversity and are dedicated to a free, strong and fair press. The News Fund is supported by Dow Jones, Dow Jones Foundation, other media companies and private donations.
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Founded in 1925, the Columbia Scholastic Press Association unites student editors and faculty advisers working with them who produce student newspapers, magazines, yearbooks and online media. Students come from public, private and faith-related schools and colleges throughout the United States and from overseas schools following an American plan of education. The Association is owned and operated by Columbia University.