Student story- Adviser returns to school each summer

By Brooke Pritchett

For 11 years, teacher Susanne Gray has been coming to the Flint Hills Publication Workshop.

And unlike most advisers, she signs up for classes right alongside the students. By now, she’s taken pretty much all of them.

“It helps me in that it reminds me what it takes to do quality journalism,” said Gray, who teaches at Wichita Southeast High School. “It’s nice to actually be around people who do what I do.”

Currently, she is taking photography for the second time.

“I’m still not a good photographer,” Gray said, laughing and smiling. “I enjoy photography because it’s very active”

One of her other most memorable years was her first. She had been signed up for the advisers’ section by Southeast’s previous adviser and loved the story she did on tattoos and body piercing places that year. She vividly remembers walking into one of the tattoo and piercing parlors. Music was playing.

Skin Heads Rule
I’m a tool.

The lyrics filled the air as she researched her story on the worker and an 18-year-old student who was getting the cartilage on her ears pierced. She really enjoyed doing the story, interviewing and writing.

Gray gets emotional when discussing her friend, Tim Janicke, whom she met that year. A regular instructor at the camp, Janicke hasn’t been able to come for the past two years since facing brain cancer.

Her worst year, she said, was in 2007. She was loving her new media class when she got a phone call. She picked up the phone to discover that her oldest child had just been rushed to the hospital by ambulance because of a severe asthma attack. That night was hard for Gray.

“I was just waiting to find out what was going on,” she said.

She hurried home and spent the next four days with her child in intensive care.

So far, she has only missed one year, after giving birth in 2001.

She plans to return.

“As long as I have students who want to come, I’ll be there with them” Gray said. “I just think that we’re really lucky to have a place like this in Kansas.”

Brooke Pritchett is a sophomore at Derby High School and a student in the advanced writing class at the Flint Hills Publication Workshop.