A version of this story originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune.
Sister Ann Christine Heintz, a member of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and a former journalism teacher, was the founder and adviser for Youth Communication, a national news service and journalism training program for minority and other high school students. She served as co-chair of the TV committee of the Journalism Education Association and was awarded the Carl Towley Award in 1966.
”She was an ardent advocate of high school students being professional journalists,” Sister Katie McHugh, a member of her religious community, told the Chicago Tribune. ”She had such admiration for teenagers. While many people cringe in dealing with them, for her it was a passion to see that they got to the top in the field of journalism.”
Sister Ann graduated from the Academy of Our Lady and Mundelein College. After entering the Sisters of Charity, she attended Marquette University, Milwaukee, where she received a master’s degree in journalism.
She taught journalism in high schools in Clinton and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and St. Mary’s Learning Center on the West Side. While teaching there in 1971, she was named National Journalism Teacher of the Year Award by the Tribune’s Educational Services Division.
In 1976, she founded Youth Communication. It offers a national, student-written news service for high school papers and the commercial media and a cable TV program that gives teenagers experience in other aspects of newspaper production.
Youth Communication published New Expression, an independent publication with a circulation of 120,000 that served high school students throughout the Chicago metropolitan area. The center was principally, but not exclusively, staffed by minority students.
”Sister Ann was also very much involved in social justice and peace issues,” Sister Katie said. ”She had a great interest in minority issues, Central America and peace and encouraged students’ participation in the solution of such issues. She was also most certainly a feminist.”
Sister Ann Christine died in 1989.
