Sacramento’s only high-school run radio station provides real-world tools and fosters community

By Helen Harlan | Solving Sacramento (Left to right) El Camino Fundamental High School students Elizabeth Ramirez and Tori Norlie work in the studio airing KYDS 91.5, Sacramento’s only high school-run radio station. (By Manuel Figueroa) Credit: XavierFigueroaPhotography It was business as usual in Room S1 at El Camino Fundamental High School just after 9 a.m. on a recent Friday morning. Twenty-seven Intro to Media Arts students worked on audio and video projects at individual Mac workstations as media teacher Matt Sumpter sat at an unassuming desk upfront and Vanilla Ice’s “Ice-Ice Baby” played over the loudspeakers. “I just threw it on because I like the song,” Elizabeth Ramirez, a 17-year-old senior, said of the ’90s hip-hop anthem, which hit the charts more than two decades before she or any of her peers were born. Ramirez stood in the DJ booth which occupies a studio attached to Room S1. This is the headquarters for KYDS 91.5 FM, Sacramento’s only radio station run entirely by high schoolers. On the airwaves, Ramirez is known as The Lizard, her self-anointed DJ name. She is one of more than 40 student DJs who run the KYDS microphone live from 8:30 a.m. until the last...