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University of Massachusetts Amherst professor Nick McBride talks with students participating in the Community Journalism Project at Springfield's High School of Commerce.

(Dan Glaun | MassLive)

On a Wednesday afternoon, two days after unrest over the death in police custody of Freddie Gray left buildings and cars burning in West Baltimore, students at the High School of Commerce in Springfield were deep in discussion.

They were not alone. Students from the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Community Journalism Project sat perched on desks and tables, listening and piping in their own questions. Teacher Michelle McGlone showed video clips of media coverage of the protests on a projector and the students - college and high school - bounced ideas off each other in a free-flowing discussion.

"It's a governmental system," one said. "You can definitely make waves without using violence," said another.

It is an issue that hits close to home at Commerce, which is majority black and Hispanic and whose students have their own stories of police contact and gang violence; just this March, reports of a gunshot near campus brought police to the school, where officers reportedly used mace to break up a fight. UMass student Brian Belivacqua asked whether mass protests, like those in New York City, Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, could come to Springfield as well.

"It has happened in Springfield, man," UMass journalism professor Nick McBride said. "Many times."

It is McBride, a gravel-voiced Springfield native and journalism professor at UMass, who brought these classes together. The Community Journalism Project, in its seventh year, takes a class of UMass journalism students to Commerce each semester, where they work with high schoolers to produce original reporting and a magazine.

The demographic differences are stark between UMass and Commerce, where 90 percent of the class of 2014 was low-income and graduates are more likely to go on to community college than a four-year school. But, McBride emphasized in an interview, the program is a two-way street, not a charity.

"This is a reciprocal intellectual exchange," McBride said. "I tell my kids you're not here to play save the natives. It's not us and them. We are them."

UMass senior Nia Decaille, on her third year with the program, echoed that sentiment. She has grown up with the class, she said, and built relationships with Commerce students that gave her as much as she offered back.

"It's been one of the most rewarding experiences I've had in college," she said. "Some of these kids are really mature for their age, and really talented. I think that's what people miss a lot when they talk about Springfield and Commerce high school kids."

Teiya Gardner, a Commerce junior, has written about issues ranging from teenage pregnancy to sneaker culture since she joined the program as a freshman. The class has offered more than she could have expected, she said, providing a forum for free expression and relationships with UMass students who she described as mentors.

"I just came in and thought we were going to sit down and write," Gardner said. "It was so much more than that."

For McBride, the Community Journalism Project is a kind of homecoming.

McBride graduated from Commerce in 1972, after growing up in what he describes as a more optimistic Springfield, less tainted by the industrial decline that would leave it with an unemployment rate nearly double the state average. He attended Westfield State University and UMass before working as a reporter at newspapers including the Springfield Daily News -- a former publication that merged with the Springfield Republican -- and the Washington Post.

Journalism had sparked his attention since childhood, when McBride sold papers as a newsboy and would spar with older customers over the stories on the day's front page.

"I loved it," McBride said. "I was usually parroting my father's views, but I'd piss 'em off really good."

The Community Journalism Project began in 2008 as collaboration between McBride and Brian Duffy, a Commerce teacher and one of McBride's former students at UMass. UMass students visit Commerce each week and work with them to report and write news stories, some of which are compiled into a magazine at the end of the year.

"He was trying to figure out some way to create some enthusiasm for learning, and at that time the principals were spinning in and out of here -- I think it was three or four in the first couple of years he was teaching here," McBride said. "It's like all the stereotypical things you think about in urban schools were in force at this time."

The project, which centers on a democratic, discussion-oriented educational philosophy that McBride said is designed to break down the traditional hierarchies of public education, has also led to opportunities for its students outside the classroom.

Jorge Colon, a soft-spoken junior who moved to Springfield from Philadelphia last year, recorded one of his poems for New England Public Radio in April. The performance made public what Colon describes as a personal and cathartic writing process; the poem, titled "Strength," deals with questions of identity, abuse and his relationship with his father.

"It's a really good way to cope," Colon said "When I don't have nobody else to talk to, or I don't feel safe enough to tell somebody - I can control the conversation, you know?"

And for Fynta Sidime, who moved to Springfield and participated in the project after spending much of her childhood with her grandmother in a small town in Guinea, the class set her on the path to Hampshire College, where she will begin studying theater and gender studies in the fall.

"It helped me figure what I wanted to study, really," Sidimie said. "I was very shy, I was always quiet. I came out more, I thought more that I can go to college and do more."

And though the work produced by the class sometimes raises serious issues taking place with Commerce's walls - see, a recent blog post by teacher Michelle McGlone which examined gang violence and police presence within the high school - the student journalists have been given free rein by the administration, according to teacher Andrew Evans.

"From my point of view, one of the biggest successes of this program is just for the students in Springfield to have contact and to have relationships with people who are in college," Evans said. "At this point I haven't had any pushback."

Wednesday's session was the last for the project this year, and the last ever for seniors in both schools who have spent years building friendships that may, at first, have seemed unlikely. But the community journalism project will be back at Commerce next fall, dedicated, according to McBride, to a kind of education that transcends measurement and test scores.

"It's kind of like jazz music," he said. "What we're trying to create with kids is an aesthetic experience."