Norma Jaimez understands the importance of finding her own voice. “My mom’s voice gets lost,” she says, “but being on the newspaper gives me that sense of voice.”

Fresh out of high school, Norma has had experiences most people do not accomplish in a lifetime. She has scaled mountains in China, attended a medical science program at Stanford, is the recipient of the Hispanic Heritage Award in academic excellence, is the co-editor of The Eastside Panthers and she’ll be attending Yale this Fall. At Yale, she’ll be in the minority. Only 6 percent of Yale University students are of Latino descent.

Norma is a student at a very unusual school. Eastside College Prepatory Academy is a small, private school where 100 percent of the graduates go on to a four-year university. Norma and fellow staff members of The Eastside Panthers, all underrepresented minorities, know they possess the skills to pursue a career in journalism if they choose. Their success has much to do with the culture of their school: small, familial, and where individual differences are celebrated. The seniors who graduate Eastside are trained to be confident leaders. They take their academic career very seriously. They understand that that their words and actions can make a difference.

It is lamentable that the educational experience of students at Eastside is the rare exception, not the norm, for underrepresented minority students. As advisers teaching in large public schools where the dominant culture is to silence student voice, where conformity is valued over individual differences, we must find the strength to continue to fight for our programs. High school newsrooms may be one of few places left in large urban schools where students are taught to value their own ideas and voices.

The job of the media is to reflect the people of the community it covers. As high school advisers, we act as curators of our own school’s history and culture. Our students create the context for the conversations in the halls and classrooms of our schools. Not only do we reflect the culture of the school, we also help to define it. The same is true of professional journalists. Journalists create the local and national topics of interest about what is happening in our towns and across the nation. San Francisco is a minority majority city, but only 14.5 percent of the reporters who work for the San Francisco Chronicle are people of color. When story ideas are generated in morning meetings around a conference table, what perspective is missing? Unfortunately, the number of minorities reporting the news remains extremely small, despite years of tracking and efforts by organizations such as the American Society of Newspaper Editors to change this fact.

It is a sad fact that in this country only a small segment of the population decides the context for our national and local conversations about what is the news. As we fight to keep our programs alive, we are also fighting to create a more balanced perspective in newsrooms across the country. Not every student we touch will go to Yale, but every student in this country should understand, in the way Norma does, the power of her own voice.