You never know what’s going to happen on Raider TV. One minute, a faculty member or community leader is making an important announcement. The next minute, students will give mental health advice over soothing music. Right after that, the “LaCroix Boys” barge unannounced into classrooms and give students and teachers more canned sparkling water than anyone would ever need.
It’s a mixed bag they can describe in just four words: “sweet, stupid, informative and entertaining.” For the rest of PCHS, this is “normal.”
It might be exactly what PCHS students need now that the COVID-19 coronavirus pulled the rug out from underneath them and closed school through at least May 1. As zany as RTV is, being able to count on the morning show running five days a week with new content gives the students something that could easily have been taken away from them in the blink of an eye.
“As long as we are needed, we will be there,” Kristen Ryan said. “It’s a sense of normalcy and it’s always there for the students. They can always watch, count on us for announcements and to make them laugh. We’ll be there for them.”
Casey Hamilton, who has taught TV Production classes at PCHS for three years, said he initially “freaked out” when he heard the news about school closing indefinitely. Guidelines prohibiting gatherings of 10 or more people and asking people to stay six feet apart from each other presented a new challenge. How could his students stay together and stay creative with the deck stacked against them?
Within an hour of Hamilton floating the idea of keeping the morning show going to his upper-level students, the kids made three videos.
“Really, it’s a time to throw anything at the wall and see what sticks,” Hamilton said.
If anything, the school closure has forced RTV to get even more creative.
Rylee Baxter said ideas are constantly being floated in a massive group chat and most get filmed within a day. Bigger projects, like an upcoming “Shark Tank” spoof that was originally about a PDA prevention device but is now being rewritten for the quarantine, take longer to film but are generally done within a month.
“We have a majority of the input,” Baxter said. “Any creative sketches we want to do, we can send to the chat. It’s kind of filtered through what’s gonna be put on the show. It’s probably 40 or so kids in the chat for the morning show.”
Though the show’s runtime has doubled from 10 minutes to 20 for the quarantine, plenty of ideas to fill the bigger runtime are flowing. Ideas like Gustavo Vasquez’s “Spirit Week from Home,” in which PCHS students share selfies or videos from home with their “quarantine outfits” on like a traditional “Spirit Week” theme, are also welcome as they get the rest of PCHS involved and can bring Raider Nation together remotely.
“A lot of us spitball through the group chat,” Baxter said. “It’s just a matter of filming them over two minutes. Most of the videos we can come up with a day in advance. They’re simple ideas and meant to be fun. Gustavo is always coming up with ideas.”
It’s not just goofy skits, of course. Raider TV is also a place for announcements to be shared, constantly reminding students about their online resources in Edsby and Clevver for remote learning while schools are closed. Students can learn about things that are important right now, like updates on the Hillsborough County Public Schools Grab ’n’ Go program that provides free meals for students in need.
Ryan said the transition from working at the school to working from home was smooth.
“I feel like it’s not any more difficult than it was before, just because we don’t have any restrictions in making it,” she said. “We’re all home, we all have our phones, some of us even have cameras and real equipment. “
Since the show was already being uploaded to the Raider Television Network RTV channel on YouTube, they didn’t have to worry about how to host it. The students quickly adapted to filming on their phones, though Hamilton did take all the equipment from his classroom when school closed and will deliver it to his students if they need it. Instead of uploading the final project to a flash drive and plugging into a computer at school, everything’s sent by text and email.
The only major difference in the editing process is that Hamilton and his students can no longer be together to watch finished products. The RTV crew is like a big, quirky family and the students said the support they all give to each other makes even the “stupidest” sketches feel special.
“That’s a sad difference, too,” Hamilton said. “When you’re there and you watch the video together, you get to see everyone’s reaction. To me, that’s the hardest part. That part sucks. But we’re working our best to get through it.”
Hamilton said the plan for now is to keep working remotely through May 1, the date HCPS has circled as the tentative end to the coronavirus closures, then go right back to normal. If HCPS extends the closures, they’ll keep working remotely for the rest of the school year and plan to return to the classroom at the beginning of the 2020-21 school year. If the latter ends up happening, it will be a bittersweet time for an RTV crew that’s set to lose a lot of seniors to graduation — seniors who have been with Hamilton for all of his three years at the school.
“I’ve learned so much from them,” he said. “I wouldn’t take my job as seriously as I do if I didn’t have kids like these. They make it so easy to care about them… every teacher wants to cry over students leaving and feel happy they’re moving on into the world to become adults.”
You can watch the show on YouTube and expect new content from Monday through Friday each week until the end of the school year, whether the students are back in the classroom this month or still working remotely.