Abstract
It is a scene too awful to contemplate, and yet one so common in the United States it’s impossible to ignore. High school students hiding in a closet while a former classmate stalks the hallways with an automatic rifle, ready to open the closet door at any moment, take aim and begin shooting for no apparent reason.
Raise Your Voice is the story of high school journalists who survived the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, and later covered it for their school newspaper. Documentary film producer Maribeth Romslo was affected by TV coverage that Valentine’s Day in 2018, some 1,700 miles away in St. Paul, Minnesota.
She found herself connecting to students through their journalism teacher’s account on CNN. Romslo recalled, “after I saw MSD journalism teacher Melissa Falkowski, I sent her an email saying I was interested in telling a story about her student journalists” (para. 18). Romslo, a former student journalist, immediately saw the value of the MSD survival story. She met with the students who had a mission to fulfill at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C.
Several key characters add their accounts of student activism to the MSD survival story. Mary Beth Tinker, a plaintiff in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969) encourages the journalism students to work toward their gun control reforms. Student journalist Neha Madhira enters the documentary frame as an award-winning editor of Prosper High School’s Eagle Nation in north Texas, where she fought for the right to publish editorial opinions contrary to the school administration’s wishes.
Romslo’s decision to bring in unrelated stories to support the central theme of student activism is understandable, but also distracting. Tinker and Madhira crusaded for their respective causes in Iowa and Texas, but we are never sure what exactly their stories were all about. Such questions are left unanswered, as are other ones about the Parkland shooting’s issues and events.
Raise Your Voice never directly refers to Florida’s gun laws, only in cutaways, and offers no clues about who the shooter was. The documentary seems to say, “Never mind, just let the passion of these students’ courage inform your feelings.” That narrative approach succeeds in an emotional sense, but critical questions beg for answers, especially since conspiracy theorists have challenged the MSD mass shooting as a “false flag event.” The viewer cannot help but wonder if omitting key facts about who did it and how it happened might encourage others to fill in the blank spaces with nonsense.
This documentary does offer welcome teaching tools for journalism and mass communication students such as supplemental questions and answers to guide class discussions. All of which affords an effective vehicle for generating thoughts and conversation in journalism and media law classes. Graduate students at this reviewer’s university were given the task of viewing the documentary and discussing it the following week. What they had to say about Raise Your Voice was enlightening.
“I think it was phenomenal,” said one student, “a deep look into what these students experienced in their tragedy, and a testament to how they channeled it into positive change.” “I found this documentary to be very raw and emotional . . . —it achieves its objectives—it is not enough to be aware of First Amendment rights—kids need to be allowed to live by these protections and utilize their voices,” said another one. Others shared similar sentiments, including one student who was brought to tears and a mother in the class who said she felt the need to hug her children afterward due to the documentary’s impact.