She thought it was a creative writing course. When I first heard that it was a journalism class, I was actually kind of disappointed, Stanislawski said.
But then, she wrote her first article about a teacher who was retiring after 30 years of teaching.
“I realized that journalism is actually storytelling, about real people,” she said.
Four years later, she was named the 2021 Student Journalist of the Year by the Wisconsin Journalism Education Association.
Since enrolling in that first journalism class, she s joined the staff leadership team for Wauwatosa West High School s extracurricular journalism program. She s also on the editorial leadership board and helped create The Tosa Compass, which is run by journalism students at Wauwatosa East and West.