About the Lantern

The Frederick Lantern is the online student news site of Frederick High School, 5690 Tipple Parkway, Frederick, Colorado. Our school population is currently 1,437 students.

The Lantern is staffed by the students of Frederick High who enroll in the Journalism class. While there is no “after school” club time devoted to the Lantern, students enrolled in the class have to regularly report on after school activities like sports games, theatrical performances, academic showcases, and music concerts.

While the annual news site staff must be enrolled in a class, The Lantern is always willing to publish stories from any FHS student, teacher, administrator, alumnus, or parent if they meet our publishing guidelines. To submit a freelance story, use the link at the top of this page.

The Lantern publishes three to six stories per week from Labor Day to Memorial Day each year. The Lantern is a member of the Colorado Student Media Association and is supported by the Frederick chapter of the Quill and Scroll International Honor Society for High School Journalists.

Our Humble Beginnings: The Warrior Scout

The Warrior Scout logo, designed for Frederick High School in 1979. This image donned the masthead of both the first and second iterations of the Frederick Scout. (Frederick Lantern)

The earliest iteration of the Frederick High student newspaper was The Warrior Scout, a physically produced monthly newspaper from 1979 to 1987. The Warrior Scout covered student social life and school sports, and the paper featured original comics, puzzles, and games made by the students.

The original newspaper 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”). Fittingly, the masthead of The Warrior Scout was an originally commissioned drawing of the head of a Native American warrior,

Increased costs, decreased readership, and a lack of student interest led to the shuttering of The Warrior Scout in the spring of 1987. For 30 years, Frederick had no student publications other than the yearbook.

Revival: The Frederick Scout and Dreamcatcher

The logo for The Frederick Dreamcatcher (2016-2022). The name for the literary magazine came from the idea that writing and art are dreams made real, so a literary magazine would be a literal catcher for dreams. (Frederick Lantern)

In 2017, English teacher Brandon Coon founded Frederick High’s first literary magazine The Frederick Dreamcatcher. The Dreamcatcher created its first issue after holding a scary story contest that has now become a Frederick tradition. The Dreamcatcher went on to publish the artwork, photography, and creative writing of the students and staff of Frederick.

A year after the founding of The Dreamcatcher, Mr. Coon and Frederick student Shawn Rose (’20) revived the student newspaper as The Frederick Scout. This second iteration of the newspaper started as a small after-school club with Rose as its first editor-in-chief. The Scout reused the old Warrior Scout masthead, and it published movie reviews, sports stories, and student life stories each month on a homemade website.

Interest grew in the new newspaper over the spring of 2019, resulting in the formation of a new journalism class. The after-school club of students became the Frederick chapter of Quill and Scroll, and the Journalism class became the new staff of the paper. Frederick partnered with School Newspapers Online to develop a fully functional news production site. Publication increased to five stories per week right before the start of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The Scout then became a vital lifeline for students, using its new social media to give pandemic updates.

The Frederick Scout masthead, which graced the top of our school news site from the first site launch on October 31, 2018 to the relaunch of the news site on May 31, 2022. (Frederick Lantern)

A New Dawn: The Frederick Lantern

In spring of 2022, Frederick High changed its mascot from the Warrior to the Golden Eagle to comply with Colorado Senate Bill 21-116, which required Colorado schools without official tribal affiliation to get rid of any Native American mascots to avoid being fined by the state. Part of this change required Frederick’s publications to also shed any links to Native American iconography.

After a month-long process, the staff of the Scout changed the news site’s name to The Frederick Lantern as a reference to the lamppost icon used by the City of Frederick. Lanterns have historically symbolized a light in the darkness used to lead the way, and that’s what this publication hopes to be: a way to illuminate what’s going on in the world to Frederick High’s students and what’s going on at Frederick High to the rest of the world. The masthead for the Lantern was originally designed by Joelle Richard (’23) but was streamlined and simplified as part of a site design overhaul in summer 2025.

The flame in the center of the original 2022 Lantern logo (left) and the current redesign (right). Joelle Richards designed the flame to have three different flares: the orange shape makes an F for Frederick, the yellow an L for Lantern, and the red an S for Scout, the old newspaper. The distinct shape of the yellow flame was also meant to emulate a bird in flight for our mascot, the golden eagle. While the redesign simplified and streamlined the flame to make it easier to reproduce and scale, the stylized F, L, and S shapes remain, and the gold flame still evokes an eagle in flight. (Frederick Lantern)

The Dreamcatcher literary magazine became fully housed inside the news website under the category Lantern Lit. With the new name came a new logo: an inkwell bearing the same flame shape as the Lantern logo and one of the feathers from the Dreamcatcher logo as its quill.

The Lantern Lit logo, designed by Mr. Coon.

Lantern Lit has shifted its focus from print publication to digital posts and contests, though collections of work are occasionally printed in the new literary annual The Lampblack. The new literary magazine got its name from the sooty residue collected from a lantern that was used for pens and paints before the development of commercial inks. The blue-black hue of lampblack dons the masthead of the Lantern Lit page, and its accent color (Lit Violet) is made using an inversion of the hex code for New Scout Blue, which has been the main site’s accent color since its time as the Scout.