This is the last article that The Frederick Scout will publish.

Over the past year and a half, some incredible changes have come to Frederick High. We have a new principal who brought on new grading policies that have changed the student experience. We’ve met new teachers and coaches, and have said farewell to teachers that have become institutions at Frederick such as Coach Peeples, Mrs. Moore, and Mr. and Mrs. Allen.

During this time, The Scout also shifted. The pandemic redefined what student journalism needed to be, as we shifted from reporting on athletic games and spirit days to focus on news the community needed to know to stay safe and informed. Last year, we redeveloped what The Scout could be, and this year, we pushed to grow The Scout into the best high school newspaper we could.

And we did. Out of the 200 articles we published this year, three were chosen by School Newspapers Online as the top 1% of student writing in the nation. We earned Distinguished Site recognition in Story Design Excellence and Continuous Coverage. Over the course of the year, we had over 10,000 different people read our news site and grew our Instagram following by over 300 followers. We reached our 600th published story and our first (but not only) story to earn over 1,000 views. All of this led to The Scout earning a ranking in the top 100 school news sites by School Newspapers Online, something no other Colorado high school paper achieved this year. We’re happy to say that The Scout will end on a high note.

If we have been so successful, then why is The Scout ending? Like many changes happening in the next couple of months, this is tied to Frederick’s mascot change as a result of Colorado Senate Bill 21-116. We’ve covered the bill and the change in several Scout articles in the past year and a half, but the main gist of the situation is that anything connected to Frederick High School that has deliberate and well-known connections to traditional Native American imagery must be changed to avoid the school being fined by the state.

One look at The Scout‘s masthead shows how our paper is inexorably tied to Native American iconography. The original editors named the paper “the scout” to evoke the Native American scouts that would look for danger and report to tribal leaders (as well as the fact that newspaper reporters are sometimes called “scouts”). This masthead ran above the original Warrior Scout, our school-produced newspaper from 1979 to 1987. The newspaper stopped being produced in the early ’90s due to the rising cost of materials and waning student interest. Upon becoming the head of Frederick Journalism in 2016, Mr. Coon worked to bring the Scout back. What started as an after-school club that would publish four articles every month on a self-built website grew to the Scout in its current form.

While our entire staff credits the success of our paper to our history and deep roots in the community, we acknowledge that the time of the Scout has run its course and that our little paper had to evolve into something different. We started by looking backward, past the reestablishment of Frederick High in 1987 to the days of the old Frederick High. It turns out they had a newspaper back then too, one with strong ties to current Frederick iconography: The Frederick Lamp Post.

While we all liked the idea of this iconography and the pun of “Post” referring to both a periodical and a literal post, we decided to go against a direct revival like was done with The Scout. We spent weeks considering names that would stand out from other school newspapers and honor our history while uniquely being our own thing.

At last, we came to an agreement: As of May 31, we will become The Frederick Lantern.

We like that the Lantern harkens back to not just the first Frederick High paper but also Frederick’s history as a mining town, as the dark caverns of the mines would be lit by kerosene lanterns in the days before electricity. This brings us to the symbolism of the lantern: it’s used to guide the way and illuminate in the same way that we hope that our writing can illuminate important events and guide our community toward positive action that benefits all of us. We also like that the Lantern is a name used for newspapers but rarely, allowing us to have a memorable and defined identity. Finally, given that our news is beamed to you on the electrons inside your phone, tablet, or laptop, it seemed fitting to use a source of light to represent us.

While this change won’t happen immediately, it will happen soon. On June 1, we will begin changing our site URL and our social media handles. If you already follow us, don’t worry: you will be automatically migrated to follow our new accounts. We will also replace our masthead and other key iconography with the one above, a temporary identifier until next year’s journalism team redesigns our entire site around a fresh color palette and layout sometime around September. We will also archive all Scout stories on the site, so don’t worry that your favorite articles from the year are going away.

While we’ve loved working for The Scout and will miss everything we loved about the name and what it represented, we’re also excited to forge ahead on a new chapter of Frederick High history. Change is hard, whether it’s moving on from high school into college or changing a name to better reflect our beliefs. Thank you for supporting us this year, and we hope you will join us in our new future as the Lantern.