Jenks High School students win national award for documentary on homelessness

Two Jenks High School students are now national award winners for a documentary they created about homelessness.

3,500 students nationwide participated in C-SPAN's StudentCam Competition, and the two from Jenks won second place.

Sometimes the most meaningful lessons don't happen inside a classroom, and this lesson happened behind a camera.

"I feel like homelessness is easily attainable," said Emma Curry. "You don't realize how close someone can be to experiencing homelessness...one job you lose, you can become homeless."

"It helped me understand and see homelessness through his eyes," Ashley Blanche said.

Homelessness is the subject of the student-made documentary: "Invisible People: Hidden in Plain Sight."

Emma and Ashley put in countless hours researching, interviewing people, and editing.

"We could've made a 30-minute documentary," Ashley said.

They only had six minutes, but it was still a lot of work, and most of it happened outside of school hours.

"It was really hard because we only get fifty minutes in class to work on stuff, so we would rarely ever finish something in class, so we would have to come in a lot of times after school," said Emma.

Six months of hard work paid off. Ashley and Emma are second-prize winners in C-SPAN's StudentCam National Documentary Competition and will split $1,500 in prize money.

While they're happy about the award, the knowledge they gained is even more valuable to them.

"It's interesting reaching out to professionals, and I think emailing people and having to set up interviews has really helped me, and it's not something I would do if I weren't in this class. I think that will be really impactful for me going forward," Emma said.

Their six-minute documentary airs on C-SPAN on April 15th.

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