When crises happen, the voices most often heard are those of adults. Georgianna McKenny, a rising senior at Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science, sought to change that by giving a voice to children impacted by the water crisis in Jackson.
McKenny, a Crystal Springs native, wanted to highlight the struggles students in Jackson Public Schools faced when there was no running water.
Her nearly 8-minute podcast episode, called “How the Jackson Water Crisis Affects Education,” helped her receive recognition as the National Public Radio Student Podcast Challenge winner for 2023. The award was announced on Wednesday.
“I decided I wanted to focus on the people not as represented in the media, so I first focused on three target groups — disabled, elderly and children,” McKinny told the Dispatch. “… Learning about it was very interesting, and I thought that it was a very important topic from the beginning. Because there was never, at least on the news I watched, any articles or reports that mention children, I wanted to bring about that information and show these people are being affected.”
The state’s capital faced uncertainty with the public water system last summer from a build-up of problems and again in January when water pressure plummeted as schools came back from winter break.
McKenny’s podcast begins with an alarm ringing for a female high school student to wake up and get ready for the school day only to find there is no water pressure in her home — a problem she has faced for a whole weekend.
McKenny sought input about the situation from various sources such as news outlets, a JPSD employee and the high school student. Other problems students faced were classes merged with other schools that didn’t have running water and impacts in the cafeteria and bathrooms with no water pressure.
NPR judges scored her podcast based on her information and structure, personality and creativity, and production quality, according to its website. McKenny was one of more than 3,300 entries in the competition from 48 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.
Her podcast was part of a research project she conducted for Thomas Easterling’s university composition class. Like a typical composition class, the students perform research, interviews and write a paper. Unlike a standard composition class, students pair up to write a script and produce a podcast, called “Real Mississippi,” based on their research.
Students were paired, one as a scriptwriter and the other as a producer. McKenny was both for her podcast.
“If they’re scriptwriters, they have to take the academic language of the research paper and turn it into a script that people might find interesting,” Easterling said. “The funny thing about Georgianna’s project was that she wasn’t really sure she wanted to turn it into a script. She thought she had a pretty good story to tell, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear her voice on the radio.”
As winner, McKenny received a feature on NPR’s website, a trophy, certificate and her podcast played Wednesday on the station.
Though this is the third year Easterling has entered his students’ work into the competition, it is the first time one of his students has won the whole thing.
“She does such a great job of telling a story that really only she bothered to tell,” Easterling said. “It’s really a testimony to her level of engagement with the world around her. One of the great things about podcasts is that from the very beginning forces students to articulate why a place is important to them. Ultimately it encourages them to think not just critically but also empathetically, and that kind of discourse really is important for students not just to be better scholars or people but to be better citizens.”
McKenny said winning the award helps her achieve her goal of the podcast — telling the world a new perspective of the Jackson water crisis.
“I never expected to get this far, but I just wanted to show that viewpoint,” McKenny said. “… I hope more people will now know about what’s happening in Jackson and attention will be brought towards it. I expected more people to know what was going on, but I was talking to friends out of state and realized it’s not as well known as I thought. I hope that more curious people will listen to my podcast and understand what’s happening.”
A previous version of this story misspelled McKenny’s name. That has been corrected.
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