The availability of school newspapers across the the New York City system are spotty at best, with just a handful of them publishing a weekly or monthly publication.

For Dawn Hunter, a Riverdale resident who teaches at City College Academy of the Arts in the Inwood section of Manhattan, the creation of a paper used as a tool for understanding media literacy in her English class made sense. It became an instant hit.

“We want the kids to have a voice, and we also want them to deepen their thoughts and have them speak out and seek the truth,” said Hunter, who found that teens heavily rely on social media to get their news.

She and her colleague, Dennis Mihalsky, an ESL teacher at the school, have been taking on the ambitious goal of lobbying other schools across the city, including the Bronx, to create a school newspaper of their own. It’s part of the Students Disrupting campaign that Mihalsky founded, which involves surveying teachers to gauge interest in starting a paper in their school. The newspaper, should teachers agree to form one, would be adapted as part of the English curriculum.

Mihalsky was compelled for such an endeavor after learning that so few schools, about 1 in 10 according to estimates he picked up from the New York Times, have a school newspaper. The report found the Bronx has the fewest number of school newspapers. “That’s when I realized that this needs to be something that should be brought to all of the schools in New York City to have the same effect and the same positive outcome that it had on our school,” said Mihalsky, who plans to accurately quantify the number of schools without a newspaper.

Some Bronx schools that once published a paper no longer do, including the Celia Cruz Bronx High School of Music and Bronx International Charter School.

At the City College Academy of the Arts, students applied to each position at the newspaper. Their stories—much of them hard-hitting, including an exposé on delays in replacing old backboards with ones purchased two years ago—were published in the paper’s inaugural edition dubbed The Claw.

For Hunter, the paper’s purpose is multi-prong, giving students a chance to improve their writing and literacy skills, while exposing journalism’s influential power in promulgating change. Students were also given carte blanche to venture outside the classroom searching for their stories.

“We saw kids who didn’t work in their class actually sitting down and writing, and typing, and researching,” said Hunter. “And it built community in the class too. We felt also that kids who mainly weren’t getting along all of a sudden everybody was getting along. It was amazing.”

Mihalsky agreed, noticing a dramatic change in some students’ engagement on journalism. “They were writing stories that they were interested in. It was going just beyond them just wanting to get a good grade. They were actually wanting to just see their name and their story and their work in a printed version of what every student was going to be reading.”