Classroom 15 Book company information, Employees & Contact Information

A result of an investigative report by tenacious University of Oregon journalism students, Classroom 15 tells the story of how the dreams of fourth-grade students at the Riverside School, Roseburg, in rural Oregon timber country, were crushed by the prevailing Red Scare, McCarthyism, state and societal censorship, and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. This project was written and edited by nine undergraduate students (now recent graduates) of the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication. We thought your audiences may be interested in the project – a project that speaks to the skills, talents and value of the next generation of journalists along with the importance of re-examining the stories of generations past. Classroom 15 explores borders, international communication, governmental overreach, propaganda, and fear. The authors spent over a year researching, interviewing, and writing. Reporting teams traveled throughout the West, drawing on sources from the FBI and State Department to the then-nine-year-old secretary of that fourth-grade class in 1960. To draw the story full-circle, one of our authors traveled to Russia, carrying letters written by contemporary Oregon fourth-graders to connect Oregon’s Classroom 15 with Gymnasium 14 in Rostov-on-Don, finally, these sixty years later. Classroom 15 managing editor and co-author Julia Mueller is pursuing her Master’s at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism as a member of its Politics, Policy, and Foreign Affairs specialization. She earned her BA ('20) in journalism from the University of Oregon Clark Honors College. Classroom 15 co-author Zack Demars spent the summer after graduation working in Central Oregon as a Snowden intern for the Bend Bulletin. He’s a news reporter for The World newspaper in Coos Bay, and its sister papers in Brookings and Crescent City. He earned his BA ('20) in journalism and political science from the University of Oregon