Students take home $500 Cash Prize In Their Attempt To Raise Awareness About Opioid Abuse

Indiana Area Senior High School

Students take home $500 Cash Prize In Their Attempt To Raise Awareness About Opioid Abuse

By JENNY TODD

Students Caroline Albert, Alex Ball and Arden Neiderhiser recently made a video for their Digital Media 11 class on the dangers of abusing opioids.

Mr. Puskar, the Digital Media Productions teacher at the Senior High school recently assigned his DMP II & III classes the challenge of making a video that raises awareness about how addictive and what results may come from the use of overusing opioids. After students finished this assignment for class Mr. Puskar made sure that all students submittted the videos to the 2022 PIAA’s “Don’t Let Pain Become a Killer” :30 PSA Video Contest. Resulting from these submissions of videos from IHS, the video entered by IHS Juniors Caroline Albert and Arden Neiderhiser plus Sophomore Alex Ball were chosen as Runner up and received a $500 cash prize.

Arden Neiderhiser said that, “our inspiration for making our video the way we did was from Mr, Puskar. When he was going over the project, he gave an example that we immediately knew we wanted to use as an outline. He had talked about how we could show a teacher saying “tell a teacher” and a coach saying “tell a coach” and so on.” Arden also talked about how making the video wasn’t the easiest task and that, “the video took us a few weeks to get all of the clips, audio, and graphics. It then took a few days for me to edit the whole thing together.” Arden and everyone else’s hard work definitely paid off.

Another student involved in the video group; Caroline Albert said that, “our video was about prescription opioid abuse in students. It gave students who are struggling ideas about who they could reach out to for help. Our video also included a statistic about how many students have abused opioids in the past.” This topic is something not always addressed in school. Bringing awareness to something so important has made students hopefully open their eyes to how careful you really need to be at this age.

Alex Ball was the last member of this group. She is just a sophomore and already spreading awareness that will hopefully result in more videos the next two years of Highschool. She said, “I think that it would be cool to make videos in the future to spread awareness if I have enough time to do so.”

The video was shown at the Giant Center in Hershey PA during the State Basketball Championship games and will be shown at PIAA State playoff games during the upcoming Spring and Fall sports seasons. Alex, Caroline and Arden were not able to attend the award presentation in Hershey in March, so they received their certificate and cash prize of $500 via a package sent to IHS and then these winning students are able to decide on their own what to do with their prize.

Last school year, Dexter Froud, who graduated from IHS in 2021, took home the $1000 prize in the PSA contest. It is a huge accomplishment for IHS students to win “back to back” years and will be a tradition that can hopefully be carried on for years to come.

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