20 questions. It’s been a popular game throughout generations. One player thinks of one person, place or thing while the other player is allowed to ask 20 questions to be able to guess what the other is thinking.

That’s kind of how this issue of the North Star is. You may be wondering, how does a high school newspaper relate to a guessing game? Instead of 20 questions, we have 20 things all centered around one question: Why does it matter?

We wanted this paper to be about the things students care about, and the issues they encounter daily. We figured, this paper is for the students so why not let the students choose? So, in mid September, the North Star staff created a list of 40 topics, all of which we felt were important to high school students. We then had students take a survey with each of the 40 topics listed, asking them to choose which ideas they would want to know more about. From there, we chose the top 20 topics that were selected as their interests.

After narrowing down the ideas we wanted to put into the paper, we decided to take it another step further and include the students opinions yet again. We created another survey compiled of 30 questions. These questions went more in-depth, asking students about some of their personal life, including their influence to drink alcohol, what stresses them out, and their opinion on ecuation at FHN. 370 students took this survey, including 117 freshmen, 72 sophomores, 74 juniors, and 107 seniors. We used their responses throughout the paper, allowing students to compare what they would respond with to the student body’s response as a whole.

While you will find many heavy topics, we wanted to make it more fun. Instead of writing 20 700-word stories about controversial topics, we shortened the

stories and expanded the graphics. You’ll find several different types of alternative storytelling, all of which are used to keep you interested and reading.

Each topic has one focus relating to the idea of why it matters. Every story, every graphic goes back to why it matters to students and how the people of FHN can relate to it and apply it to their everyday lives. We wanted to figure out why students care about these topics, why they’re so important, and what statistics and stories we could find to support that.

So thank you. Thanks for reading. Thanks for taking our survey. Thanks for helping write this special edition. We wanted a paper for the students and what matters to them. We hope these 20 topics help capture that and help answer the question “Why does it matter?”