“In the summer of 1991, Middletown high school, roughly 70 miles north of Manhattan acquired a handful of video cameras. The goal was to train the school’s teenage students in film-making and media production, using local subjects as a starting point – perhaps a documentary about the city’s sports teams or an amateur talkshow. Instead, under the tutelage of Middletown high’s popular English teacher, Fred Isseks, a rowdy and diverse group of teenagers organized themselves into an investigative journalism unit.
Officially, Isseks’ class was open only to the school’s oldest students, aged 16 to 18 – but, unofficially, it welcomed everyone. Kids not even enrolled in the course joined Isseks’ students in shooting short films. The teenagers alternated between grungy early-90s flannel and choker necklaces and awkward attempts at business attire as they honed their reporting skills.
Isseks’ course, known as Electronic English, would propel many of its students into careers in media production and environmental law, but at the time their work did not receive universal approval. There were warnings of arrest from the county sheriff; near-total disinterest from the city’s local newspaper; public frustration from regional politicians; and at least one death threat. All because over the next six years, culminating in 1997, students passing through Isseks’ high school class would film, edit, and release a feature-length documentary that exposed a generation’s worth of illegal, mob-connected dumping of toxic materials in their part of New York state.”
I read about Fred and his Electronic English class in February of 2002. As the child of a life long public school teacher - and a public school student myself - I was instantly moved by Fred’s belief that teenagers need to be given work with genuine meaning and consequence in the world, an ethos which shaped his entire teaching career and, in the process, change his students’ lives.
Alas, by time I reached out to Fred, Rise Films in the UK had already beat us to the punch. But that aside, I’m glad that this story is being told. Visit Fred’s blog where you can watch, GARBAGE GANGSTERS AND GREED, the documentary his students made between 1991 and 1997.