What kind of crazy kids come to school on a Saturday for a writing competition? Well, our journalists do. They came to school on the first Saturday of spring break for the Southwest Los Angeles Journalism Education Association (SCJEA) write-offs on March 31. 

“It was better than I expected and I had fun,” said ETDA junior Kaija Plum said. 

A journalism competition is when different schools in the Southwest region compete against each other in different categories. The categories are features, sports, editorial, news, and photography. There were different speakers to speak for each category. The schools in attendance were Torrance, Redondo, Carson and Rancho. Judges came from CSULB and the Daily Breeze. 

Well overall Rancho placed second place for the whole competition. That’s good for it being our first time in a journalism competition. For some of our journalists, this was their first time competing. 

“It was pretty stressful to write a story in one hour,” said ETDA junior Christopher Espejo. 

After listening to speakers and watching their presentations the journalists only had an hour to write their stories. That had to be pretty stressful because some journalist are used to having a long time to write their stories. They could use the dictionary but they couldn’t use google. They couldn’t even put their names on their articles or they would be disqualified. 

“I was a little disappointed that I was disqualified but I got the chance to meet journalists,” said LGPSA junior Devon Wright. 

Our two top journalists were Kaija Plum who came in third place for her article in Editoral and Sandra Vasquez who also came in third place for her article in Features. 

“It was pretty fun because I got 3rd place. My story was about a teacher and her life,”said LGPSA junior Sandra Vasquez. 

“I thought it was good. I didn’t think I would place in the whole thing but, hopefully the next competition I will win again,” said LGPSA junior Jazmine Cortez. 

“My story was about two boys making a blog website and kids were talking about other kids. I got fifth place for my article,” said ETDA junior Christopher Espejo. 

Besides the write-off , there was also a photography competition. Unfortunately there was only two competitors and they were both from our school. Tiara Shaw placed 1rst for her photo while Breanna Wedlow came in second for her photograph. 

Dr.Vieira was very pleased with his journalism students because he was happy that most of them placed. 

“Well, I thought it was great because it was our first competion. We had a lot of students who were brave enough to participate. They did well and I was a little bit surprised that we came in second place. Carson was really strong and Torrance didn’t really bring that many people so I didn’t expect them to do that well,” said Dr. Vieira.