News
A High School Teacher Changed Everything — And The Lessons Still Echo
Faith Facts
- A Christian journalist reflects on how a high school journalism teacher shaped his 40-year career through timeless principles of truth and accuracy
- From a shy band student to Editor-in-Chief, the journey began in a small Texas town classroom in 1986
- Core journalistic values taught decades ago continue to guide faith-based reporting across 50 states and 20 countries
Ronald Reagan was president. “Top Gun” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” were massive hits at the box office.
Telephones were attached to the wall, and long-distance calls were expensive. Not home?
People left messages on answering machines.
The year was 1986 in Keller, Texas — a small farm town about 15 miles north of Fort Worth. Big hair was everywhere, both in the hallways of Keller High School and across pop culture.
For one shy, introverted student who had moved through five states before settling in North Texas, that year would mark a turning point. The late Jack O’Pelt urged his friend to join him in taking a journalism class.
“Why not?” thought Bobby Ross Jr., who liked writing and needed an elective course.
“Ms. Crane” — now Janie Crane Burchfield — was their teacher. And from the moment Ross walked into her classroom his sophomore year, her passion for core journalistic values such as truth, accuracy, fairness and impartiality resonated with him.
“The only reason I taught was to teach journalism,” she told Ross in a Facebook message this week.
In her class, students learned how to count headlines, which in the days before electronic pagination was necessary for print layout purposes. They steered proportion wheels to calculate photo sizes and cropping.
They wrote their stories in longhand and sent them to a typesetter, who returned strips of text they cut with X-acto knives and arranged on pages.
But those ancient skills weren’t the most important lessons Ms. Crane bestowed. She taught English students, too, but that subject wasn’t what drove her 25-year teaching career — journalism was her calling.
It didn’t take Ross long to decide he wanted to spend his life in the newspaper business. But first, he had to muster the courage to conduct his first interview.
Ross had moved around constantly as a child. His father served in the Air Force and then became a preacher.
He attended schools in five states — Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, Missouri and Tennessee — before the family moved to Keller in 1982 for his parents to serve as houseparents at a Christian children’s home. In his freshman year at Keller High, he often ate lunch alone.
So when he got his first story assignment — a piece on the KHS stage band earning superior ratings — he scribbled his questions on a piece of paper. He snuck into band director Wayne Tympanick’s office and stuck his request for answers on his desk.
Before long, Tympanick came and found him.
“If you want to be a journalist, you need to sit down and ask me these questions,” he told Ross.
So he did.
Over the next two years, Ross devoted more and more of his time to The Wigwam, the student newspaper. He reported on topics ranging from students cheating to a fatal crash involving classmates he knew.
By the second half of his junior year, he became the editor.
He covered trends such as the “VCR craze” — as they described it in a headline. Here was the lede he wrote as an 18-year-old senior:
Signs that something’s sizzling, maybe even sweeping the nation, certainly abound. From the ever-expanding number of video specialty shoppes to local supermarkets to convenience stores, rent-a-movie places are popping up almost everywhere. Many teens are staying home on the weekends, popping their own corn and throwing “VCR parties”, as a substitute for those expensive, sky-high-priced trips to the movie theaters.
Besides their serious reporting, they had a whole lot of fun, too. His junior year, Keller High opened a new school building with a large classroom for the newspaper and yearbook staffs.
Each publication had its own office. They were side by side, and one day Ross mischievously lifted the tiles above the newspaper office and crawled into the ceiling space above the yearbook side to listen to the conversation below.
Fortunately, when he crashed to the ground as he left a messy crater overhead, a chair below softened his fall. Ms. Crane was anything but happy with him.
But she evidently didn’t kill him. Because he lived to type this.
Fellow Wigwam staff member Diana Williams — now Diana Dworin — was a year younger but just as devoted to a future in journalism. While Ross was a geeky teen, her outgoing, bubbly personality made her popular beyond the newspaper classroom.
She’d later attend the University of Texas and work as a journalist. One time, Dworin and Ross wrote a joint column on how “squeezing the Charmin” had joined the list of KHS extracurricular activities.
Yes, pranking people by covering their house, yard or trees with toilet paper was a thing even back then.
To Ross’s delight, Dworin — now a hospital chaplain and, like him, a doting grandparent — recently mailed him a package of old Wigwams that helped stir these memories.
Another Wigwam alum is Barry Ryan, a fellow Class of 1986 graduate who was one of Ross’s best friends at KHS. They still enjoy catching up from time to time at Texas Rangers games.
“We were a very good team that complemented each other well. I enjoyed both the camaraderie and, in the case of Bobby and Diana, the playful and healthy competition. As a bystander to it all, it was great to watch the banter and the occasional one-upmanship.”
“For me, the opportunity to explore, learn and develop skills in addition to some outstanding friendship was a privilege and a blessing,” Ryan added in a Facebook message.
Amen to all of that!
After graduating from KHS, Ross attended Oklahoma Christian University, where he edited the campus newspaper The Talon and earned his journalism degree in 1990. He later reported for small community newspapers in Oklahoma for three years before joining a major Oklahoma newspaper in 1993 and then going to work for The Associated Press in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2002.
Ross has spent the past 21 years with The Christian Chronicle, based in Oklahoma City. He’s traveled to all 50 states and 20 countries to cover the news.
He launched the Plug-in column for Religion Unplugged in 2020 and is in his seventh year of writing it.
In so many ways, he’s living his dream life as a journalist — four decades after his Wigwam days at Keller High. The foundation laid by a dedicated Christian teacher who believed in truth, accuracy, and the power of storytelling continues to shape every story he writes.
To all his friends in the Class of 1986, happy 40th anniversary! He knows there’s a reunion planned, but he won’t be able to make it.
Total honesty: That shy, introverted teen inside him never completely disappeared, and he’s still not ready for that level of social interaction.
Let us know what you think, please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Faith Facts
- Dr. Anthony Fauci privately expressed concerns about COVID-19 vaccine miscarriage risks while publicly telling pregnant women there were no safety issues
- The revelation raises serious questions about transparency in medical guidance affecting the lives of unborn children and their mothers
- This pattern of deception must not be repeated in the ongoing national debate over the abortion pill mifepristone
A disturbing pattern of dishonesty has emerged from recently revealed private communications involving Dr. Anthony Fauci. Text messages show the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases privately expressing concerns about miscarriage risks from COVID-19 vaccines even as he publicly reassured pregnant women that no safety red flags existed.
This revelation strikes at the heart of trust between medical authorities and American families. For Christians who hold the sanctity of life as paramount, the implications are deeply troubling. Expectant mothers deserved complete transparency about any potential risks to their unborn children, not reassurances that contradicted private concerns.
The betrayal goes beyond simple miscommunication. It represents a willingness to prioritize messaging over truth when it comes to the lives of the most vulnerable among us. Pregnant women across America made healthcare decisions based on incomplete information, never knowing that the very officials guiding them harbored private doubts.
This pattern of deception cannot be allowed to repeat itself in the ongoing legal and cultural battle over mifepristone, the abortion pill. As courts deliberate the future availability of this drug, Americans deserve absolute honesty about its effects and risks. The lives of unborn children hang in the balance, and families must have access to complete, unfiltered medical information.
The mifepristone debate encompasses far more than regulatory procedure. It touches fundamental questions about the value of human life, the role of government in protecting the vulnerable, and the integrity of our medical establishment. If Fauci’s pattern teaches us anything, it is that public health officials must never again be permitted to hide concerns that affect decisions about life and death.
Conservative Americans have long questioned the trustworthiness of government health bureaucracies. The Fauci texts provide concrete evidence that those concerns were justified. When officials believe they know better than the American people what information we should receive, democracy itself is undermined.
The mifepristone question demands rigorous scientific scrutiny, transparent reporting of adverse effects, and honest acknowledgment of what these pills do: end the life of an unborn child. No political agenda, no regulatory convenience, and no public relations strategy should be allowed to obscure these basic truths.
As this nation continues to grapple with abortion policy in the post-Roe era, the lessons from Fauci’s deception must inform our path forward. Pregnant women deserve better than half-truths from those entrusted with their care. Unborn children deserve advocates who will speak plainly about threats to their existence.
The fight over mifepristone will test whether America has learned from past failures of transparency. Will medical authorities provide complete information, or will they once again decide what truths the public can handle? The answer to that question will reveal much about the current state of both our medical establishment and our national character.
Let us know what you think, please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Faith Facts
- The WNBA is holding an emergency meeting on player eligibility following controversy over biological males in women’s sports
- Two former NBA players have declared for the 2027 WNBA draft, intensifying pressure on league officials
- Phoenix Mercury guard Sophie Cunningham recently voiced support for keeping men out of women’s sports, sparking league-wide debate
The Women’s National Basketball Association finds itself in the midst of a controversy that should have been settled in elementary school biology class. After Phoenix Mercury guard Sophie Cunningham publicly supported keeping biological males out of women’s sports, the league has scheduled an emergency meeting to address player eligibility standards.
The situation escalated dramatically when two former NBA players announced their intention to declare for the 2027 WNBA draft. This bold move has forced league officials to confront questions they’ve apparently been avoiding: What defines a woman in women’s sports?
Cunningham’s straightforward stance on biological reality has created what the league is treating as a crisis. Her comments reflected what most Americans — and certainly most Christians who believe God created male and female — understand as simple truth. Yet in today’s climate, speaking biological facts can trigger institutional panic.
The emergency eligibility meeting reveals the WNBA’s apparent fear of defending women’s sports as actually being for women. The league now faces a choice between standing firm on biological reality or capitulating to ideology that would fundamentally undermine the purpose of women’s athletics.
This controversy extends beyond basketball. It represents a broader cultural battle over whether institutions will defend truth and fairness or surrender to political pressure. Women athletes have worked for generations to build opportunities in sports, and those achievements deserve protection.
The former NBA players’ draft declarations — whether serious or satirical — expose the logical absurdity of denying biological differences between men and women. If eligibility standards aren’t grounded in biological sex, then women’s sports cease to exist as a meaningful category.
For Christian conservatives who value both truth and fairness, this issue is straightforward. God created humanity male and female, and those biological realities matter in contexts like sports where physical differences create distinct competitive categories. Protecting women’s sports isn’t discrimination; it’s justice.
The WNBA’s response to this emergency meeting will reveal whether the league prioritizes the women it was created to serve or the activists demanding it deny basic biology. The stakes couldn’t be higher for female athletes who deserve to compete on a level playing field.
Let us know what you think, please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Faith Facts
- The Trump administration has allocated nearly $2 billion to religious and community organizations for global health and disaster relief, the largest such funding in over two decades
- Major Christian organizations including World Vision and Samaritan’s Purse are among the primary recipients of this historic funding
- This redirection of funds comes following significant cuts to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
In a historic move that signals a dramatic shift in America’s approach to foreign aid, the Trump administration has directed nearly $2 billion to faith-based and community organizations working in global health and disaster relief overseas. This allocation represents the largest funding commitment to religious humanitarian groups in more than two decades.
The decision comes on the heels of significant cuts to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), marking a strategic pivot in how American taxpayer dollars are deployed for international humanitarian assistance. By channeling resources through proven faith-based organizations rather than traditional government agencies, the administration is returning to a model that prioritizes effective, values-driven relief work.
Among the primary beneficiaries of this historic funding are World Vision and Samaritan’s Purse, two of the world’s largest and most respected Christian humanitarian organizations. These groups have established track records of delivering efficient, compassionate aid to vulnerable populations around the globe while maintaining strong ethical standards rooted in Christian values.
This reallocation represents a fundamental rethinking of foreign aid distribution. Rather than funneling billions through bloated bureaucratic agencies, the administration is empowering organizations with proven abilities to deliver results on the ground. Faith-based groups have long demonstrated superior efficiency and accountability in crisis response, often achieving more with less while maintaining strong ties to local communities.
The shift also reflects a growing recognition that religious organizations bring unique strengths to humanitarian work. Their deep community connections, volunteer networks, and values-based approaches often enable them to build trust and deliver aid more effectively than secular governmental agencies. For decades, Christian relief organizations have operated in some of the world’s most challenging environments, providing not just material assistance but hope and spiritual support to suffering populations.
For American Christians and conservatives who have long questioned the effectiveness and ideological priorities of traditional foreign aid programs, this redirection offers a welcome alternative. Instead of supporting programs that may conflict with American values or lack accountability, taxpayer dollars will now flow to organizations that share the faith and principles of millions of Americans.
The nearly $2 billion commitment comes at a critical time when global needs continue to escalate, from natural disasters to conflicts creating humanitarian crises. By partnering with established faith-based organizations, the administration aims to ensure American generosity reaches those most in need while maintaining accountability and alignment with traditional values.
This policy shift may also serve as a blueprint for reimagining government partnerships with faith communities across multiple sectors. The success of this model could encourage similar approaches in domestic programs, recognizing that religious organizations often serve as the most effective first responders in times of crisis.
Let us know what you think, please share your thoughts in the comments below.
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