Welcome to the Register Forum’s 129th year! As a club, we feel honored to serve this community through our journalism, and we are excited to see how the Register Forum grows this year.

It has been noted several times in these pages that the Register Forum as a club is not nearly as racially diverse as it needs to be to tell the truths of the CRLS and Cambridge communities. This is a fact that we as an organization have been thinking about for a while and are committed to fixing. 

This year, the Register Forum is taking several steps to turn these stated priorities into reality. First, to make our conversation about racial diversity in the Register Forum productive, we need data. Instead of looking around the room at RF meetings to gauge the racial diversity of the club by assuming how people identify, we need clear, hard facts. In the coming months, we hope to send out a survey for all CRLS students to take. This survey will illuminate for us who is contributing to the RF, why they are or are not, and what we need to be doing differently to make the RF more representative of CRLS. 

We also understand that part of ensuring the Register Forum is more representative of CRLS as a whole means making it more accessible. Most people find out about the Register Forum once they get to CRLS, and we want to change that. We have begun building relationships with all of the CPSD middle schools in the hopes of increasing readership among middle schoolers so that when freshmen arrive at CRLS, they know what the Register Forum is and have read it. We are also hoping to have CRLS clubs contribute to the Register Forum’s bimonthly “centerspreads” to increase awareness and accessibility of our club within the school.

Even with these changes, we know that there is always going to be more we can and should be doing to make the Register Forum a better, more accurate paper. That is why, this year, we are introducing a new element of our opinion section: letters to the editor. Through letters to the editor, we hope CRLS students and faculty feel more comfortable expressing their thoughts and concerns about our journalism coverage, our editorial decisions, and our club as an organization. The Register Forum is CRLS’ student newspaper, which means that it serves the CRLS and Cambridge communities. To accomplish this goal effectively, we need to hear from you. To submit a letter to the editor, email [email protected].

With your feedback, we will hopefully get closer to the publication and organization that we strive to be. But as it stands now, we don’t have a succinct, representative motto that encapsulates what we are working towards. 

Over the next few months, we are going to undertake an intense brainstorming process to come up with a set of words and phrases that represents the Register Forum and our role in the community. Register Forum contributors and editors will play a large role in this discussion, but it is paramount that the broader CRLS community has a voice in our motto development as well. If you have ideas about phrases we should consider, values we should present, or other ideas, please fill out this survey: https://tinyurl.com/RFMotto. 

The Register Forum is the oldest continuously published high school newspaper in the country. We must live up to that fact by accepting feedback, acknowledging our shortcomings, and making change in our organization.

This piece also appears in our September 2019 print edition.