C-SPAN to Air Documentary by Ramsay High School Students Jacari Dillard, Erial Malone

By Sym Posey | The Birmingham Times Two students at Ramsay IB High School are second-prize winners in C-SPAN’s national 2024 StudentCam Documentary competition. Jacari Dillard, 17 and Erial Malone, 17 will receive $1,500 for their short documentary, “The Two Trillion Dollar Crisis” which will air on April 14. In Birmingham, C-SPAN is available locally through Spectrum. StudentCam is C-SPAN’s annual national video documentary competition that encourages students to think critically about issues that affect communities and the country. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the competition. Students were asked to address the theme: “Looking Forward while Considering the Past”. C-SPAN awards cash prizes totaling $100,000 to the student filmmakers of the top 150 student documentaries. Dillard and Malone, the only Alabama students to place, chose to address student loans because “it is such a popular topic especially with [President Joe] Biden’s student loan forgiveness program being big right now as well as, being seniors in high school, we don’t really understand how student loans really affect us,” said Dillard. “Last year we decided to pick inflation as our topic because we were doing a lot of things in the classroom related to that specifically,” he said. Their video,...