Several WLTL students are working in conjunction with local radio station WCKG to produce a weekly news show that seeks to bring high school news to an adult audience throughout DuPage County. The show, “Study Hall Radio,” airs every Saturday at 2 p.m. on AM 1530.

“Most adults are way out of high school, so they rarely know what’s happening in them,” WLTL Advisor Chris Thomas said. “So the point of the show is to let that kind of audience know what’s going on in high schools from a student’s perspective.”

Although the first episode of the show aired on April 4, plans for the show had been forming as early as January.

Several students had been working part-time at WCKG as board managers, so WLTL already had ties to the station. After being approached by WCKG Operations Manager and LT alum John Spataro `09, Thomas decided to offers students on WLTL Management the opportunity to produce a show and it eventually became a weekly production.

Producing a show for a commercial station provides students with valuable work experience, Thomas said.

“Going through an experience like this should help students down the road if they choose to pursue a career in radio or media in general,” Spataro said. “Being able to say that they produced a show for a commercial talk radio station in the third largest market in the country before they leave LT is something that not a lot of people can say.”

Students have participated in production as well writing news features every week for the show.

“It’s actually been a lot more work than I had anticipated,” WLTL Operations Manager Conor Wiegmann said. “Typically with a news show you get a little bit of a break in between every feature you’re writing, but with this there’s a lot of overlapping.”

The shows that have aired thus far have contained features about subjects like the cost of prom, AP testing, college applications and driving.

“We want to find issues that high school students care about and amplify them to the largest audience possible,” Spataro said.

On top of connecting with a larger audience than most other WLTL productions do, Thomas and Spataro both hope to get radio programs at other local high schools involved in the production of “Study Hall Radio” as well.

“We’d love to get other schools in the listening area to give us stories as well, because LT is its own community, and while we’re all high schools, there are little differences between every school that would give listeners an interesting perspective,” Thomas said.

For the time being, WLTL students will remain the sole producers of the show. Despite the difficulty of the work, students have been able to succeed in producing a captivating show for the intended audience, Thomas said.

“I think it’s great and I’m really proud of the work the kids are doing,” Thomas said. “I think the fact that it reaches such a broad audience adds a little stress to it, but I think they’re handling it really well. I’m really proud of the fact that we’re impressing an audience of new listeners.”