By Archer D’Angelo

For the past three years, I have been a part of our Terrapin Times Newspaper, and it has certainly been quite an eventful three. We have written, by my count, 41 articles since my joining in the Fall of 2022, with seven more set to release along with this article. We have made remarkable progress in establishing the first club at Brooklyn Independent and expanding it to a school-wide institution.

Before I came to BKI, I had been editing a Newspaper for PS32, my Elementary school. During BKI’s orientation, I asked if BKI had a Newspaper as well. One of the students on the call (they weren’t called Ambassadors yet) told me that he had recently started one and was very interested in having new 6th Graders join. I later met this student, Clyde, at BKI and immediately began discussing the Newspaper with him and Mr. Grijalva who was officially running the club. However, the first meeting took quite a while to organize and just as I began to forget about it, I walked out of class to Clyde sitting at a desk in the middle of the 4th floor hallway, trying to get people to join his Newspaper, an offer I accepted, yet again. We then began holding our early meetings and wrote up a lot of our most notable early articles, with me focusing primarily on my Complete History of Ukraine for the majority of that year. Later in that year I would also write “America’s Exploits #1”, a odd article and start to a non-existent series, most notable for starting my repeated reference to 1930s Louisiana Senator and Governor Huey Long, a figure all Newspaper Club members are likely very tired of me talking about. At the end of that year however was my most important article, “Ranking Ancient Empires” which would start the Terrapin Times’ most remembered and arguably joked-about series that I would work on with Clyde until his graduation last year. 

My Seventh Grade was an odd year for the Terrapin Times as only Mr. Grijalva, Clyde and I ever showed up to any meetings. Due to the Eighth Graders being busy, it was a much smaller team with there only being a single article published that year written by someone other than us, which, incidentally, was our most popular article of that year. I did enjoy that year however, as we were able to get some of our best work out from our ill-fated Election Polls to our ever-expanding “Ranking Empires” series, one of my favorite things I’ve ever worked on. My true highlight of this year however, was my interviews. I conducted interviews with the then-undefeated BKI Soccer team and the Chorus Class which almost performed at the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Lighting. These articles helped me meet many of my fellow BKI students that I may have never spoken to if it wasn’t for these articles, an experience I very much valued.

Eighth Grade has been the most unique of these three years as this year I ran the Newspaper myself with Clyde graduating the year prior. I am very proud of all the work we have gotten done this year with an all-new team of writers working this year. We have managed to bring the Terrapin Times back to a solid ten members. I feel that the Terrapin Times is in very good hands with the new Sixth Grade class who I think can expertly carry the Newspaper forward into future years at BKI. 

I am extremely grateful for my time at the Terrapin Times, and will truly value everything I’ve experienced in, and written for it. I am very excited to see what will come in the future and wish the best of luck to next year’s team. As I have finished many articles before, thanks for reading, and goodbye! goodbye!