When I joined Columbine in 2016 to teach video production, graphic design, and digital photography, Rebel News Network already had a long history. It had once been a true live television production, distributed through analog infrastructure to televisions throughout the building. By the time I arrived, that system was gone. Students recorded and edited announcements twice a week, exported the finished program, and handed it to teachers to play in classrooms.

It worked. But I saw an opportunity to turn a filmmaking class into something much bigger.

I had no background in live broadcasting and no requirement to rebuild any of it. I taught myself what I needed to know, worked through the institutional and technical constraints, and began building.

Students read announcements from printed scripts, often looking down at the page rather than at the camera. Episodes were edited, exported, uploaded to the school server, and manually played by teachers.

It delivered information. It offered almost no immediacy, no audience connection, and no opportunity to develop the disciplines of live production.

I inherited a purpose-built studio with lighting, power, and a small four-channel mixer. My initial budget allowed for little more than a camera capable of feeding the stream and a compact encoder. That was enough to prove the idea.

The larger obstacles were outside the studio. District policy, student privacy, licensing agreements, Google Workspace ownership, YouTube permissions, and broadcast access all affected whether students could be streamed to classrooms at all. I worked through those constraints with school and district leadership while solving a second, deceptively difficult problem: how do you make a livestream reliably accessible to every classroom in the building?

Leadership was willing to trust the experiment. I needed to make that trust worthwhile.

Before the rebuild, announcements arrived through emails, handwritten notes, conversations in passing, and messages left in my mailbox. Live production couldn’t operate that way.

I replaced the fragmented intake with a standardized form and trained faculty across the building to use it. Every morning I arrived before the rest of the school to turn those submissions into the day’s broadcast. As RNN matured, the same form expanded to accept graphics and prerecorded media directly from clubs and organizations.

I wasn’t just rebuilding the output. I rebuilt the input.

The first digital livestream changed student behavior immediately. The printed scripts disappeared. Students read from a monitor positioned beneath the camera, which brought their attention toward the lens and created a far more direct relationship with the audience.

And something significant happened on the very first live broadcast: the principal used it. His branded Christy 60 segment appeared in RNN’s first-ever livestream. The platform was experimental. Leadership participation wasn’t.

For about five years, RNN’s teleprompter was a carefully designed slide deck. It was deliberately simple. Warm-up and countdown slides embedded the operating instructions directly into the sequence, so the interface taught the job while the job was happening.

It didn’t need to look sophisticated. It needed to work instantly for a teenager under live-production pressure.

Read the full teleprompter document (PDF) — a reconstruction from the production system rather than an archival copy, kept intact so the structure is visible.

Students observed broadcasts from the backs of real classrooms. We watched when students looked up, when they disengaged, which segments held attention, how dead air affected the room, and what brought attention back.

Those observations drove pacing, transitions, segment length, presentation, and the overall rhythm of the show.

Students ran repeated dummy livestreams and rotated through every production role — anchor, camera, audio, graphics, prompter. Those rehearsals weren’t auditions for one ideal type of student. They were how students found where they worked best.

Some belonged on camera. Some wanted nothing to do with it. Some loved audio. Others gravitated toward graphics, switching, directing, or technical troubleshooting.

I opened the program to freshmen, which created a longer development pipeline and let experienced students train the crews coming up behind them. Filmmaking students eventually built training videos for future RNN students as coursework — recording, editing, animation, instructional design, and subtitling in one assignment. Learning the system eventually included teaching the system.

Once the live model proved itself, the infrastructure could grow. Nothing was bought because it was better equipment. Each change removed a specific piece of friction the crew hit every morning.

We worked through the signal chain systematically, testing connection after connection until we isolated it: an SDI/HDMI converter that required a power cycle after the rest of the system booted. From then on, that was part of startup.

The principal owned Thursdays. The athletic director had a Tuesday segment. Student Senate anchored special weeks. Clubs and organizations appeared directly, and students created original programming.

The RNN Film Festival pushed filmmaking beyond the classroom and created demand for the program itself — students enrolled because they saw what RNN was producing and wanted in. Anchors became recognizable throughout the building, and several went on to elected and highly visible student roles. Many continued into filmmaking, media, design, and related creative fields after graduation.

The audience became participants.

Covid removed the environment the whole system had been designed around. Students were home. Teachers became anchors. I appeared on camera. Remote recordings were edited into distributable episodes, and RNN produced mental-health programming and partnered with Student Senate on community programming and talent shows.

The production mechanism changed because it had to. The purpose didn’t: keep the community connected.

Eventually I gave RNN’s oversized studio space to Student Senate — using an enormous room for a fraction of each day no longer made sense. I moved the operation into a storage room and rebuilt the studio around years of accumulated production knowledge: new cabling, a custom lighting rack, LED cans, DMX control, an ATEM Television Studio Pro, dedicated audio monitoring, six matching monitors, and a scrolling teleprompter.

This episode features two staff members with no prior hosting experience appearing on camera to share personal testimonials and encourage students to join the annual Columbine Day of Service, held in remembrance of the Columbine shooting.

They look comfortable. They look prepared. They look like they belong there. That’s the point — by this stage the production system carried the complexity for them.

Every semester I told students what success looked like: I wanted to sit back, drink my coffee, and watch them run RNN.

Eventually I could. Students switched the show, operated audio, advanced the prompter, ran graphics, handled cameras, directed talent, solved problems, and trained the crew coming up behind them. My role shifted from operating the system to creating the conditions in which other people could operate it successfully.