By Shannon Morgan
Communications Manager

On Thursday, the National Scholastic Press Association announced Coppell High School’s KCBY-TV is one of six national weekly finalists for a 2015 Broadcast Pacemaker Award, the highest honor given in scholastic journalism.

KCBY director, senior Nick Wilson, and former director, current University of Texas freshman Hailey Hess, were named finalists in the NSPA Broadcast Feature Story of the Year contest. Former Sidekick editor-in-chief Alex Nicoll, currently a freshman at the University of Arkansas, was named a finalist for NSPA Sports Story of the Year on Wednesday.

Nicoll is one out of 10 finalists for NSPA Sports Story of the Year for newspaper, and Wilson and Hess are one out of 10 finalists for the Broadcast Feature Story of the Year.

KCBY is only national Pacemaker finalist from Texas in the weekly broadcast division.

The winners will be announced at the Journalism Education Association/NSPA Fall National High School Journalism Convention in Orlando, Fla. on Nov. 14

KCBY adviser Irma Kennedy has been at Coppell High School for 10 years, and this is only her second year to submit entries for the Pacemaker award.

“We only started competing for this award last year, so I thought it would be a few years before we got here,”  Kennedy said. “I am really in shock; I knew the kids did great when we put that last show together, and in your heart you know how good it is, but not everyone sees what you see.

“Then to top that off, I nominated students for the Broadcast Story of the Year in the feature category, and again, I thought was a solid story and I worked with them every step of the way. I saw how hard [Wilson and Hess] worked, and so I knew it was that caliber type of story.”