YTV wins grant, Looking forward to future improvements

District 205’s grant program helps Elmhurst community members (specifically schools/teachers) with special project ideas to better school systems, programs, and different aspects of the community. Teachers apply fora grant, and then depending on the project may get a certain amount of money. A few weeks ago, York’s own YTV was recently granted 125,000 dollars, due to impressive projects, like the announcements, specials, and a podcast, all created by the students.

“The grant is part of the district 205 foundation grant, which gets money from various places and the money gets put back into the schools, for people who have written a grant for a special project,” said YTV head Brendan Chambers. “Our studio is actually very outdated. All of the stuff that you see and that makes the announcements work is very old.”

Both YTV teachers and students alike are excited to upgrade equipment to help improve next year’s announcements.

YTV junior Diego Carrera said, “Definitely new equipment that helps with the announcements, a new audio board, some more macbooks, apple pc’s. The majority I want to go to the YTV

announcements, most of the mics aren’t working anymore, a lot of audio stuff needs to be fixed.”

Chambers is actively doing research on how to spend their money wisely. He wants to make the class as realistic as possible, to help York students gain experience for after high school.

“Over the next six months to a year, we’ll start to make purchases and equip this lab. Right now our setup is very piecemeal, we’re using powerpoint for our background, we’re using a small camera that you would find on the side of a soccer game,” said Chambers. “But we’re going to make it professional grade, which will help students get more experience with production, but also actually train them to be in the studio setting that would be replicable at a real-world setting.”

The foundation immediately recognized the talent and heart displayed by YTV. Giving them the grant wasn’t a hard decision.

“Several members of our Foundation 205 Board of Directors had the opportunity to meet and work with Mr. Chambers and several of the YTV students who helped us produce a video for our Showcase 2022 Gala fundraiser this year (held in February),” said d205 foundation member Kate Knicker. “We had an opportunity to witness firsthand the amazing work going on in the program. It was an easy ‘yes’ for our committee to want to fund this expansion and improvement that we knew would benefit so many people.”