Green Valley ‘giant’: Student journalists remember, honor adviser
In a classroom where the walls are covered with newspaper pages and student awards, a dozen teenagers sat in a circle the day after the general election, discussing stories for an upcoming issue of their student news magazine.
They talked about budget cuts, fashion, a feature on their principal’s penchant for blue suits.
It’s the kind of meeting that happens every month in countless high schools, but the students who produce the InvestiGator at Green Valley High School in Henderson are different because they recently lost their adviser, Eric Johnston, who died in July at age 48.
Under Johnston’s leadership, the InvestiGator repeatedly won the Review-Journal’s top high school journalism awards.
Johnston was beloved by his students and colleagues. A workaholic devoted to the InvestiGator, he seldom missed a day of school and often stayed up until at least 11:30 p.m., tinkering with yearbook pages and checking the newspaper.
The students who put together the newspaper now have a new adviser: Nicole Cvetnich, who is in her first year at Green Valley. Since Johnston’s death, she and his students have carried on his legacy, telling stories that matter to their school community.
She’s kept the Green Valley journalism classroom mostly unchanged, but it’s still been a difficult adjustment to have to put out the paper without Johnston.
‘Giant at this school’
During the recent meeting, students reminisced about Johnston, sometimes speaking of him in the present tense.
They recalled his wit and sarcasm, his apparent ability to know everything about everyone, the way he taught his students to figure out what was newsworthy and what wasn’t by shooting down some story ideas.
Photo Editor Angelina Santos said, “He pushes us beyond the limit that we think we can’t pass and he never has doubt in what we can do.”
The loss “doesn’t feel real,” said Kinsley Priebe, the co-editor-in-chief. “I feel like one day we’re going to walk in here and he’ll be sitting at his desk and will start complaining about something to us.”
Priebe said the students have had to adapt and become more independent. “I don’t think we realized really how much he did for us,” she said.
The first issue of the paper this school year was devoted to remembering Johnston, and Priebe wrote a long article about his legacy. She interviewed two of his children, his colleagues and one of his students, but said she procrastinated and sat with the interviews for a while. It was hard to sum up his life in 1,000 or 2,000 words.
Joshua Berson, who wore a shirt printed with images of newspapers, is the other editor-in-chief. Like Priebe, he has sometimes struggled to get motivated without the teacher he considered a mentor.
“Knowing that he would want me to do the work (and) wanting to honor him and honor his legacy kind of starts sparking up that motivation again,” he said.
Importance of student journalism
Johnston “was a giant at this school whom I am not trying to replace,” Cvetnich said. “It’s just not even possible. And I’m not him. I’m a different kind of teacher than him. But certainly it is challenging when you’re stepping in for somebody who has been such a pillar of the culture of the school for so long.”
She added that the staff, administrators and teachers at Green Valley have made the adjustment easier.
Cvetnich said she has a laissez-faire philosophy about her role as adviser of the paper.
She’ll give writing advice and feedback but tries to keep the students at the center of the yearbook and newspaper.
“It’s their publication,” she said.
Most of her students will not go into journalism professionally. But she believes the critical thinking and people skills they learn from reporting in high school will serve them well.
“I think that journalism as a whole is the backbone of democracy,” Cvetnich said, and student journalism is “the heart of the school.”
“There’s 3,000 kids at this school, and they all have a story,” she added. “And so I think that journalism, the newspaper especially, gives us a chance to shine a light on some of those stories so that everybody learns more, becomes maybe more empathetic.”
Contact Noble Brigham at nbrigham@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BrighamNoble on X.
