East Palo Alto has a reputation for gangs, drugs, crime, and poverty. According to a 2002 story in the Stanford Daily, The California community was not only the “murder capital of the United States” in 1992, but it continues to be the place for Stanford students to purchase illegal narcotics. It would be little surprise if newspapers in the community reflected the doom and gloom every day.

What is surprising is that EPA actually has no traditional, daily newspaper. Instead, a group of high school students see themselves as the standard-bearers of journalism in their community.

“For the past 20 years, EPA hasn't had a community paper,” said Luis Torres, who doesn’t generally like the coverage EPA gets in other Bay Area newspapers. “Papers in the area, when they cover EPA, it's usually negative — homicide, crime, violence. Our paper is so vital because it demonstrates the other side of EPA.”

Torres’ paper was The Eastside Panther the student newspaper at Eastside College Preparatory School. Torres — one of two co-editors-in-chief — just graduated from Eastside earlier this month. In the fall, he will be a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Torres, four of his fellow Panther staffers, and their adviser Angela Buenning, spoke with the participants of the ASNE High School Journalism Institute at UC Berkeley on June 16. They spoke about several different suggestions they had for the participants to take home to their own student papers.

“‘Be true to your school’ is the overarching theme,” said Torres. “Every school is unique, and that should be reflected in your paper. You can see kids actually trying to do something with their lives, and that's why it's so important,” he said.

“They should really be able to envision themselves there.”

The Panther staffers also talked about how important it is to be positive, to celebrate and recognize the good things that happen in the community.

“This year we made a concerted effort to stop and praise something that's going right in our school,” Buenning said.

Jose Ibarra elaborated on Buenning’s point, citing a staff editorial published this year commending the recent efforts of the EPA Police Department, especially regarding a new curfew for teenage residents.

“We also like to praise the positive aspects of EPA and be able to say 'Thank you for what you're doing.' We just felt like we needed to address that, that it was great people were getting more involved”

Ibarra, who just finished his junior year and a stint as the paper’s assistant features editor, will take over one of the co-editor positions in the fall. And while Buenning noted that this focus on praise was a new thing, another outgoing co-editor mentioned a long-running tradition of praise.

“We have a traditional special issue that comes out in June and we write about every graduating senior and where they're going to college,” said Norma Jaimez, the other co-editor this past year. Jaimez will be attending Yale in the fall.

This particular section gets more and more challenging every year, Buenning said. This is every graduate will attend a four-year college — that’s not just all 28 seniors this year, but 100 percent of all graduating seniors over the last four years, Buenning said, compared to what she cited as a 50 percent dropout rate in EPA overall.

Panther staffers also pointed out that while praise is good, it is the responsibility of journalists to also cover the more controversial issues

“We have a lot of immigrants at our school,” Jaimez said. “A lot of them are undocumented. That becomes a big issue when they apply for college and financial aid. I wanted to cover how these students got to the U.S, and how their families struggle.”

“Some of our undocumented students who should go to the Yales and MITs can't,” said Beunning. It is extremely discouraging, she added for these students to have been told all through high school that they are college material but then they cannot go.

“It's a painful national issue that we're grappling with.”

Relevant throughout the country, this issue especially hit home for the staff, as a few of their own were undocumented immigrants. It also presented new ethical dilemmas.

“We realized these newspapers leave our campus,” Jaimez said. “It is still illegal to be here undocumented. So we decided for the first time to use names that weren't real.”

The Panther also ran stories as well as opinion pieces last year on homicides, gay marriage, and the risks of reinforcing negative stereotypes about EPA.

“Yes, EPA has violence, but here's another side of it too,” said Ibarra. “We're trying to do something positive. We want to, with our paper, try to change the stereotypes of people from EPA.”

“It meant a lot to know that we were the only publishing paper in the area,” said junior Mayra Cisneros. Cisneros served as opinion editor this last year and will be features editor next year.

“I hope it changes people's views about EPA — 'Oh, it's not just about drugs and violence.'"