High school awards contests

For several years Cerritos Journalism has maintained a relationship with the Southern California Journalism Education Association by hosting its annual Write-Off competitions. Aside from wanting to support good journalism at the high school level, an obvious hoped for advantage would be to establish connections with local area high school programs.

But the problem is that most local area high schools do not participate in SCJEA.

So this year, after a number of years of planning, we've launched our first district-wide high school journalism awards competition that includes 13 or so categories area newspapers and yearbooks can enter work done by students this school year.

We're a bit disappointed that only a few school newspapers submitted entries ... no yearbooks. We're going to extend the deadline a week and reach out again to see if we can get a few more high schools to participate. If not, we'll go with those schools who did enter and see if we can build on that number next year.