Kualapuʻu School’s Sixth Graders Visit the Dispatch

Kualaupuʻu Charter School teacher Jamie Kalama brought the school’s sixth-graders to The Molokai Dispatch office to learn about the newspaper’s process. Photo by Léo Azambuja

By Léo Azambuja

The Molokai Dispatch staff got quite busy last week, when a dozen schoolchildren filled up the newspaper’s headquarters during a trip to Kaunakakai.  

Kualapuʻu Charter School’s sixth graders stopped by The Molokai Dispatch office for about 45 minutes in the afternoon of Jan. 15. Travelling under the guidance of teacher Jamie Kalama, the students had a lot of questions about the different stages of crafting a newspaper. 

The students learned about news gathering, news sources, design and layout, sales, distribution, advertising and printing. They saw the newspaper’s first issue — dated April 24, 1985 — on display on the wall. 

Design and layout artist Marissa Motas, who also moonlights as a photographer, showed the final digital version of the newspaper on her laptop. The PDF files are exported every week to the printer on Maui. Besides having physical copies, every single issue of The Molokai Dispatch is digitized.

Some of the students were very curious about the costs of running a newspaper. Office manager Tirzah Pactol explained how the paper sustains itself with advertisement, and how many copies — about 3,000 — are printed every week. 

Editor Léo Azambuja explained the news gathering and processing that every article goes through. He also emphasized the importance of the community’s support, especially with advertising, which keeps the newspaper financially afloat and allows the staff to keep producing fair and balanced news. Since the Dispatch is Molokai’s newspaper of record since 1985, those news have become one of the island’s most accurate historical records since then. 

The Dispatch is also a copy center, and the sixth graders learned about the office’s other services, such as printing photos and documents, and snapping passport photos. Some of the children have already travelled abroad, and were familiar with passport-photo taking.

The students were particularly fond of Freckles, a 12-year-old Irish Jack Russell and the newspaper’s resident dog since last summer.

Before leaving, the students sang a Mahalo song in Hawaiian language to the Dispatch’s staff.

The mission of Kualapu’u Charter School is to build a strong foundation for life-long learning, so with proper nurturing, the students will discover and grow, and develop skills and confidence to withstand adversity and thrive in life.