Starting a television station from scratch is no easy endeavor. Ask Lawrence High School senior Michael Brock, who created KLHS 26, a student-run station. Gathering the necessary materials and cleaning up the newsroom, Brock dedicated his time outside of class to producing a news show.

“It started out that I would just follow the class curriculum, but there was very little that pertained to shooting in a live setting,” Brock said. “That’s when we decided to change the news studio and try to make the program better than it had ever been.”

Media teacher Jeff Kuhr helped with the student project, providing guidance and creative freedom.

“We had a news desk that was basically being used as a glorified shelf, and Michael Brock and I just started talking about possibilities – about what we’d like to do and what we could actually do, given technological and financial restraints,” Kuhr said. “We both decided to just see what we could do with what we had.”

Sunflower Broadband offered to make the students’ work available through its On Demand service, Kuhr said, and the Lawrence school district offered to air the broadcasts on the district’s Sunflower Broadband Channel 26. Neither option has panned out yet, although Kuhr says viewers should look for the broadcasts sometime this summer.

Lawrence High School senior Michael Brock, left, monitors the screens for the Lawrence High School TV station as film and media teacher Jeff Kuhr tapes the final broadcast of the year on Friday afternoon.

Creating the shows required a news staff, and several journalism students volunteered to help write stories and deliver them in front of the camera.

After the first taping, principal Steve Nilhas was impressed, Kuhr said, and agreed to redirect some monies to invest about $1,000 in studio equipment to continue to make the broadcasts possible.

“I’ve always had in the back of my mind that I’ve wanted to be a reporter, and it seemed like a really good opportunity to test out the profession,” junior Taylor Renfro said.

Filming a story was vastly different from writing a story for a newspaper, as junior Audrey Seybert experienced.

“It’s challenging to make sure you keep good TV etiquette,” she said. “So you don’t slump, you smile. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be.”

The first show was about how the fatal shooting Feb. 5 outside The Granada affected the perception of rap music downtown. The final show, taped on Friday afternoon, covered more school-oriented ideas, such as Project Graduation, Link Crew and school fights.

The TV program is still in its beginning stages. The goals of the staff include establishing a working program for the coming years. The hope is that in the future the news show will produce and present the announcements every day in class.

“We would like to be in a situation where kids can sign up to work on a show and have several people involved so that there are always a few kids able and willing to put together a show,” Brock said.

For now, though, the staff is work to determine what kind of programming the station will offer.

“I like the fact that we are starting this from scratch and we have a lot of freedom for creativity,” Renfro said. “Being the first ones, you don’t have a certain direction you need to take. Sometimes it’s hard to be as creative as you need to be.”

The possibilities for programming are wide open. Some ideas for television shows include a talk show with coaches, a sketch comedy show, a cooking show and a sitcom.

One of the main benefits of this project is the opportunity it will give students to become more than passive participants in the news process.

“It allows students to be news producers, meaning it’s the students that produce or create the news and cover it, rather than them just consuming what others tell them is news and explaining why it is important to them,” Kuhr said. “A student-run TV station would be a chance for students to be seen and heard, their point of view, what’s important to them.”