Penta Career Center doesn’t just compete in video production competitions on the state level; its students set them up.

On Monday, Penta students will drive to the Greater Columbus Convention Center to set up cameras, lighting, sound, and teleprompters before competing in the SkillsUSA Ohio Video News Production Competition the next day.

“They actually know how the equipment works well enough that they can take all this equipment apart, put it back together down there, and then bring it back home and put it back together again,” said Penta Digital Video Production Instructor Russ Grycza.

SkillsUSA hosts scores of state championships; Penta brings a team to several, audio production, video production, and digital cinema production among them. Over the program’s lifetime, Penta students have gone to national broadcasting competitions six times.

In 2021, Penta placed first in the national SkillsUSA Championships for broadcast news production.

From the Toledo Technology Academy to Ottawa Hills Senior High School, area schools provide students with opportunities to gain valuable broadcasting and filmmaking experience with Career Tech courses in video production.

There, they work on everything from school events to commercial projects and community service, bringing high school event coverage to students, from students.

Panther pride

At Whitmer High School, students who take media arts courses create video projects for competitions, host live daily video announcements for WTMR News, and operate Panther Network, which streams and records Whitmer events from across the school.

Coverage includes sports like football, baseball, and basketball — but it also means live streaming the school talent show to students who can’t squeeze into Whitmer’s auditorium, filming concerts and choir events, and uploading recordings to YouTube for public viewing.

“It allows the students to be seen and heard, which without WTMR in a school our size, everything tends to just be a closed door and not a lot of students see something that’s student driven, student led,” said Whitmer media arts advisor Matt Mullan.

Mullan covers production writing, while Whitmer computer networking teacher Adam Pickard teaches the nuts and bolts of video production skills.

“The kids just eat it up. They love being part of something. They love having a camera in their hands and being there on the sidelines, just like a regular videographer,” Mullan said.

Graduates of Whitmer’s Media Arts program have gone on to area news outlets like BCSN; Whitmer grad Zach Kolhoff works for Toledo Aerial Media, a local drone company that provides creative and technical services.

While WTMR News has been around in some form since the ’90s, the obsolescence of the closed-circuit televisions used to broadcast live programming saw a decade of sporadic and pre-recorded announcements at Whitmer.

With modern tech advancements finally catching up, WTMR News is once again a live production, and the Media Arts program has swelled around it.

“It is a big undertaking; the more [Pickard] promotes it, and the more he leans into it, it’ll just keep getting bigger and bigger,” Mullan said. 

In 2025, WTMR News placed first in the northwest Ohio region at the Business Professionals of America, or BPA, competition for Broadcast News Production.

Penta promise

Over at Penta, video production isn’t a class — it’s a way of life.

With the oldest dedicated high school video production program in the region, digital video production students spend 3 hours a day, 5 days a week developing their skills for the duration of the vocational school’s two-year program.

Students learn everything from fieldwork to studio production, newscasting to live streaming. Individually assigned computers are networked together so students can collaborate on group projects.

“Media is so big with teenagers these days, between TikTok and all the music that’s available through Spotify and things like that, and YouTube and everything ... they really love learning about this,” Grycza said.

Projects include live streaming cooking classes for PACT, the Polish American Community of Toledo, from Durocher’s, broadcasting Penta’s annual Sept. 11 Patriot Day ceremony hosted by public safety students, and running the local awards ceremony for AAF Toledo, or the American Advertising Awards Competition.

Students can graduate with up to 16 hours of video production college credit and certification in the Adobe Creative Suite.

“I love seeing where my graduates go to. I have graduates all across the country, some of them doing independent films, some of them doing sports broadcasting, some of them doing acting,” Grycza said. “A lot of the students that I have have actually taken their interests, their passions, and made careers in video production out of it.”

Penta graduates have helmed music videos as the director of photography, produced music videos after touring in Europe, and enlisted with the U.S. military with a focus on video work.

Of course, no matter how much passion students have for video production, all work and no play would make anyone go crazy.

One of Grycza’s first assignments to his incoming juniors is recreating practical special effects commonly used by B-movies before the advent of computer-generated imagery. A long pole or a black sheet later, and you have a spaceship flying over Penta.

Grycza wants students to “not just learn a lot of the modern techniques that make things easier, but to actually learn the thought process that goes into making an effect, making something look real.”

Over the course of their final year, Penta seniors pick a favorite movie, creating movie posters, editing a new preview trailer, replacing a scene’s audio, and finally reshooting a full scene shot-for-shot.

“In so many of their other classes and their academic classes, they’re not really given choices,” Grycza said. “I try to say, okay, you’re going to do this, but you can make it your own by doing it.”

Watching the arts

Megan Aherne at Toledo School for the Arts takes a similar approach, but with a predictable twist.

While staying within Career Tech course guidelines, TSA’s focus on narrative cinema sets it apart from area programs, Aherne said.

“I have created my curriculum with a filmmaking focus,” Aherne said. "We’re writing screenplays, we’re doing all kinds of pre-production materials. We’re filming those stories and editing those stories with narrative and that in mind.”

Projects include documentaries and different film genres. When students pick their topics, they often feature friendships and interpersonal relationships — in other words, the stuff of high school.

“I don’t necessarily mean fighting and that kind of thing, but, you know, the longing to have a friend or the longing to have a friend back. The missing of someone who has moved or went to another school,” Aherne said.

Before Aherne joined the staff, TSA had never had a film class. The school first tested the waters during the 2014 school year.

“It was just like a guinea pig situation, you know what I mean? We were seeing if it would work out, seeing if there would be interest, that kind of thing,” she said.

That first year, Aherne and her four students braved the wilderness of video production without cameras or other equipment. She brought her personal computer in to edit and used her personal camera so students could film — but students’ main tools were cell phones and sticktoitiveness.

Their work was strong enough to earn their first commercial commission from Bryan, Ohio’s Spangler Candy. By the next year, video production had new equipment and a dedication classroom.

In the years since, video production has blossomed into a full-fledged arts major. Students learn filmmaking fundamentals, cover journalism and broadcasting, and record events for the school, which are posted online through TSA’s video subscription service ArtsWatch.

Of the many art forms, video is one of the most accessible, Aherne said.

"Everybody has a camera in their pocket. ... if you’re making TikToks, if you’re sending Snaps, if you’re putting Reels on Instagram, you already have that instinct for filmmaking as it is,” she said.

Most of TSA’s small core of video production majors go on to pursue the subject in college. One of the program’s inaugural students, Abigail Heckel, works as a location assistant for productions like Netflix’s Happy Gilmore 2 and the Apple TV+ show Severance.

“Video, similar to theater, is an art form that encompasses all arts, and no matter what you are going into, whether it’s video or not, having that ability to have a nice composition in a shot, be able to edit, be able to tell a story visually, are skills that you are going to need, no matter what field you go into,” Aherne said.

First Published March 15, 2025, 11:30 a.m.