Hardin County High School’s Tiger Radio wins national title

HARDIN COUNTY, Tenn.– At Hardin County High School in Savannah, the halls are empty and students have graduated. However, two students spent part of their summer bringing home a national title in radio broadcasting.  “It’s a lot of time and practice to get prepared for everything because it’s a big deal, and you don’t have a lot of time,” Anna Grace Baker said.

She and Maddie Blankenship won the competition at Skills USA for Tennessee, then won gold at Nationals. “You’re given a prompt, and you only have a couple of hours to get interviews, write a script, and edit everything all together into a winning piece,” she said.

This year, they had to write, produce, and edit a four-minute block on immigration reform. “We went to the mall and we just got interviews from a bunch of different people,” Baker said, and one of those interviews was from an immigrant.

“Getting an immigrant to talk about immigration reform is very difficult,” said broadcasting instructor Ron Shank.

He says they were ready for the challenge, though. “It is a working, running, radio station. We’re low-power FM, and you do everything that a regular radio station would do,” he said.

The students at Tiger Radio produce and air all of their own content for the community. “Skills USA has a motto, ‘Job ready, day one,’ and we treat this class the same way,” Shank said.

And, he says they have the full support of the community. “The administration supports us. The community supports us. Our sponsors support us. Everything in this high school and in this county works together to make a champion,” he said.