Mill Valley student will chase the ’16 race

This year’s big story is the presidential campaign, and Mill Valley High School junior Nick Nelson will get to cover it as part of “Chase the Race 2016,” a project organized by a Washington-based educational group to engage teens in creating and consuming political journalism.

Nelson, a 17-year-old from Shawnee, is one of 12 high school students chosen to participate in Chase the Race 2016 by its organizer, Envision. In addition to journalism and media, Envision provides students a chance to explore careers in medicine, law, science and engineering.

Nelson is one of two students who will cover the Democratic National Convention, set for July 25-28 in Philadelphia. Others are covering the Iowa caucuses, Super Tuesday and the Republican National Convention.

In the summer of 2015, Nelson took part in Envision’s National Youth Leadership Forum for Digital Media, Film and Journalism, a weeklong seminar held in New York. It was his participation in that program, along with a written application and a self-produced video, that resulted in his being chosen to take part in Chase the Race 2016.

“It was the journalism aspect that drew me in,” Nelson said. “I am trying to get caught up on my presidential politics.”

Nelson has been busy at Mill Valley. He’s a member of the school’s soccer and swim teams, its broadcast news team and more.

“He is someone for whom I would use the term ‘model student,’ ” said Cindy Swartz, who now works in the De Soto School District office but who last school year taught broadcast and video production at Mill Valley, where she worked with Nelson producing a weekly news show, “MVTV.” He was the program’s sports anchor last year and is again this year.

“Nick was great in my program,” Swartz said. “He was so easy to work with. In the broadcast program, you want kids with a team mentality. He worked well with such a variety of students. … You name it; if you ask him to do it, he’ll do it.”

That resourcefulness will serve Nelson well when he gets to Philadelphia. He’ll basically be on his own when it comes to producing content for Envision to push out through a variety of web-based channels.

“We’ll be doing live streaming, interviews with candidates and other political figures, analysts and reporters,” Nelson said. “Envision will advise us, and up until then we’ll be planning out what we will be doing. I also have to make several short videos or speeches about politics in the meanwhile. It’s a monthly assignment, and I will do it from home.”

One of Envision’s goals is to use the perspectives of student journalists like Nelson to engage their peers in politics.

“The whole project is about getting my generation to be interested in politics,” Nelson said.

Envision also offers a Chase the Race 2016 curriculum for classroom teachers to involve their students in national politics. In addition, the content produced by Chase the Race reporters will be shown in classrooms across the country through a partnership with Discovery Education.

Nelson said his peers are interested in “college reform, lowering the price of tuition, possibly making the first two years of junior college free, environmental issues, equal rights.”

So he’ll tailor his reports around those topics. For teens to watch them, stories have to be concise and entertaining, Nelson said.

After his senior year, Nelson hopes to get into one of the nation’s top film schools — either the University of Southern California or the University of California at Los Angeles. But he doesn’t see his future in video production, operating a camera.

“I like the screenwriting aspect of it,” he said.

This story was originally published January 26, 2016 at 4:12 PM with the headline "Mill Valley student will chase the ’16 race."