In Mark Gorey’s 17 years of teaching at Boothbay Region High School, there has never been a high school newspaper or magazine. Until now.

Gorey's AP Literature students (seniors Anna Baumm, Chloe Hoecker, Nicole LaBrecque, Collin Thompson, Zachary Vise, David Machon and Karl Alamo) have recently published the first edition of the Seahawk Script, a student-run online resource magazine that they hope to publish monthly.

Each issue with have a theme, with the most recent issue's being “Life as a Seahawk.”

With a great deal of help from Barbara Greenstone, technology integrator at Boothbay Region High School, the students created a Google site with pages for different areas they would cover. These include events, creativity, news, sports, resources and an “About Us” page.

On Jan. 5, the class was discussing archiving past issues on a new page.

Each student is currently in charge of one of these pages. One student acts as editor-in-chief for each issue, with the position rotating currently for each month. The editor creates the welcome page, and decides on themes, layouts and deadlines. The first issue's editor was Baumm, who passed the torch to Hoecker for the next issue.

LaBrecque is currently in charge of the creativity page, which has submissions of poetry, art and persuasive essays from students and teachers.

“I asked people to submit stuff by email,” LaBrecque said. “I have more to upload and I hope people will continue to submit.”

Thompson is in charge of the News page at the moment.

“I talked to (BRHS principal Dan Welch) about story ideas,” Thompson said.

He wrote three stories for the first issue, about Bryan Dionne winning health teacher of the year, Jennifer Burns winning guidance counselor of the year, and the BRHS robotics team doing very well at their first even competition.

He also linked to the Boothbay Register's website, and placed links to stories of special interest to students, such as basketball player John Hepburn scoring his 1000th point.

Vise covered sports, including boys and girls basketball, Nordic skiing, swimming, wrestling and cheerleading. He put up conference standings, meet schedules, and a link to a recent Boothbay Register article on each sport (except cheerleading). He has plans to cover New England sports teams as well, but hasn't gotten that far yet.

Hoecker did the events page, and included a link to the school calendar. She has a community calendar as well, and is working on filling that in.

Machon did the resources page, which includes resources for college and teacher sites. He wants to create a “Homework Forum” where students can ask and answer questions. The logistics of this are pretty complicated, and Greenstone is working on how to set it up properly.

Alamo did the “About us” page, which is fairly static, so was assigned to work on the archives project as well.

Gorey wanted to do a project with the class that had “nothing to do with standards and testing,” he said. He is hoping the Script becomes a tradition at BRHS and that future students continue the project.

“It's not just analyzing other people's writings,” Gorey said. “The students are creating their own works. I hope it will become a vehicle for student expression.”

At their Jan. 5 meeting, the first after the winter break, the AP Literature class discussed what changes should be made in the second issue. They talked about placing more photos on the welcome page, creating archives and re-inviting students to submit work for the creativity pages.

LaBrecque suggested the sports page should have “state qualifiers” under swimming and not “conference standings” as swimming is mostly an individual sport (LaBrecque is on the Seahawks swim team).

Other ideas were tossed around before the students started work on updating the site.

The Seahawk Script can be found at https://sites.google.com/a/csd3-brhs.org/brhs-literary-magazine/home. Anyone can view the content, however only authorized users can add comments.