All politics is local, so goes the adage, often attributed to Massachusetts’ own, “Tip” O’Neill.

So, too, is news.

In a time when the world is overrun with fake stories, misinformation campaigns, and disinformation blasts designed to mislead, more and more people seem to be turning attention to their local communities as places where they can notice things that impact their lives in the immediate now, looking at problems in need of a fix, and then taking action.

The National Writing Project, with funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, has been working with teachers and schools around the country to support civic journalism opportunities for student writers. This multi-year project to support student writers began first with journalism lessons in classrooms, then expanded to young people exploring their own communities as a source for news to report on.

Here in western Massachusetts, a successful pilot initiative demonstrates that when we give students that kind of opportunity, with a system of support and a publishing platform to report on their own communities, they can do so with enthusiasm, integrity and style.

The “Our Towns/Our Stories” initiative from the National Writing Project, which supported the efforts here in the Pioneer Valley through the Western Massachusetts Writing Project, also had a very specific focus: reaching students who live or go to school in mostly rural communities that have become “news deserts” over time, as local news organizations have either been shuttered or have reduced their presence in many small towns due to financial constraints.

As WMWP facilitators with a background in newspaper journalism, we worked with a team of teachers in schools stretching from the Berkshires to Hampshire and Hampden counties to create opportunities for students to launch community civic inquiry projects. As the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) requires civic engagement projects for students in eighth grade and at the high school level, this local-news-focused initiative matched nicely with DESE expectations for classrooms involved.

The resulting body of student work is an impressive wide variety of news features, from straight-up reporting, to editorials, to profiles of people in their community. Some students even took on multi-media productions, through podcasting, video production, and photojournalism.

Some of the published pieces include an editorial calling for the Plains Elementary School in South Hadley school to be renamed in honor of Henry J. Scala, a beloved principal who died just a few years ago (and in recent developments, the school has in fact now been renamed after Scala); an open Letter To The President, asking for cuts in the military and other programs to help support affordable housing in the country, with a personal story of displacement by the Monson student writer; and an open letter from an Amherst student to U.S. Representative Jim McGovern, asking him to support a national holiday on election days, “because every person has a voice, has an opinion, deserves to be an educated voter, and deserves to be able to exercise the rights that the people of our nation’s past fought for.”

Other stories include an essay on how trash on bike trails and public walkways is not just a nuisance affecting the aesthetics of a community but also a danger to the environment due to plastics; a mental health inquiry by a team of writers looking at how anxiety impacts high school students, with an interview with a school nurse, and the reporters’ own observation that, students who experience anxiety “often refuse to participate in specific activities, avoid social interactions, or even skip school altogether”; and the fragile state of roadway bridges and the dangers these old infrastructure projects pose, particularly in rural towns where residents that might rely on a single bridge as a connecting artery to the larger community.

“Students were motivated by the opportunity to share their stories and voice about issues that matter to them with a national audience. In a rural community like ours, students were intrigued to read stories from other students across the country,” said Brennan Tierney, an eighth grade civics teacher at Mohawk Trail Regional School. “Students were also excited for the opportunity to share their voice in a variety of ways — audio/podcasts, videos, creative writing, and profile essays.”

And Jenny Speck-Sherson, of the Michael E. Smith Middle School in South Hadley, noted that students “were energized to write as reporters for a wider audience. They enjoyed thinking and writing about what they cared about in their town in their own way.”

Early on, teachers in the initiative connected with an executive editor of a regional weekly newspaper that covers many of the area’s rural communities, and they learned about the current state of the field of newspapers and journalism, the desire by gatherings of publishers at regional newspaper to feature more youth writing, and tips on how to approach the act of gathering news in small communities.

While teachers and students took part in a pilot project, producing more than 50 pieces of local western Massachusetts-focused journalism pieces, the National Writing Project has been gearing up to launch the Our Towns/Our Stories website for educators and their students across the country later this spring, opening access to an authentic publishing platform for student writers who are engaged as citizens in the civic life of their own communities, no matter how small or remote, giving their experiences a unique voice and take on the world.

We would all benefit by listening to what these young people have to say.

The Our Towns/Our Stories site is accessible at writingourfuture.nwp.org/our-towns-our-stories.

Kevin Hodgson and Leslie Skantz-Hodgson are teacher-consultants with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project. Kevin teaches sixth grade at the William E. Norris Elementary School in Southampton and Leslie is the librarian at Smith Vocational Agricultural High School.