Student Celebrations
Salmon Bay student receives $1,500 award in C-SPAN documentary competition
Comcast brought C-SPAN’s Digital Bus to Ballard April 8 to honor middle school student Leo Pfeifer, who was the second-prize winner in StudentCam 2011.
StudentCam is an annual documentary competition that encourages students to create short films about political and public policy matters. This year’s theme was “Washington, DC, Through My Lens” and asked middle and high school students to address issues directly impacting their communities.
Pfeifer's video, titled “Homelessness: An American Crisis,” deals with the homelessness issue on a local as well as national level. Pfeifer, a student at Salmon Bay Middle School, is one of 75 StudentCam winners out of 1,069 entries submitted by 1,481 students nationwide. The documentary and an interview with Pfeifer will air on C-SPAN on Saturday, April 23.
As a second-place winner, Pfeifer also received $1,500. The Digital Bus is on a national tour and stop at Salmon Bay Middle School where Pfeifer and the cameraman, Ian Derby, were honored during a schoolwide assembly. Students had the opportunity to tour the Digital Bus and learn about C-SPAN’s public affairs programming.