In the Spring of 1999, a local high school held its annual cheerleading tryouts for the upcoming school year. Fifteen girls made the squad. A few months later, five became pregnant — despite sexual education, the threat of AIDS and ads urging teens to use protection.

So opens the lead story in Minority Mind, an eight-page newspaper produced by high school students attending the TCU Urban Journalism Workshop in June.

Sponsored by Dow Jones, Inc., the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Dallas Morning News, the 22-year-old program is designed to give minority students a chance to see how the process works.

Various professionals contributed during the workshop, including a reporter from the Star-Telegram whose assignment for the two weeks was helping at the workshop. By the end of the two-week workshop, said Assistant Prof. Earnest Perry, the eight students gathered, wrote, edited, designed and printed a newspaper issue tackling teen pregnancy, TCU girls basketball camp, popular fashion, movie and music reviews, even an opinion piece about the lack of Latin American representation on prime-time television.

“This gives ethnic minorities a chance to be on a college campus and see what the possibilities really are,” Perry said. “This gets them thinking about getting a degree or furthering a career they wouldn’t have thought about otherwise.”