Bellingham High School students try to bring Oprah to Bellingham

Written by Matt McDonald | The Bellingham Herald | January 9, 2013

Here is part of the email we received from Bellingham High School senior April Benson.

My name is April Benson and I am a senior at Bellingham High School. My leadership teacher, Mrs. O’Brien, came to us a couple weeks ago with an immense challenge: Bring Oprah Winfrey to Bellingham High School. Mrs. O’Brien has pictures of Oprah around her classroom, talks about O magazine articles, and idolizes her. Oprah is making an appearance in Vancouver BC on January 24th and Mrs. O’Brien (who already bought tickets to see her) had the crazy idea that maybe we could get her to stop at our school en route for a visit. We, at Bellingham High, are very proud of our values, diverse student body, and staff. Bellingham High School lives by three rules, The Collective Commitments; Respect our beautiful school, respect one another, and produce quality work. There isn’t a day that goes by where we aren’t reminded of these rules. Another thing we Bellingham Raiders live by is our school spirit. We bleed white, red, and black and we are proud of it, so it s eemed only fitting that we went on this mission! We admire Oprah’s success and commitment to education, and we think she would admire ours.

My leadership class is ambitious to say the least! With no questions asked, we immediately sunk our teeth into the idea. By the first day we made a Facebook page called “Bring Oprah to Bellingham High School” and got our hashtag #BringOprahToBellinghamHighSchool #WA trending on twitter and instagram. We then began brainstorming what type of tools we would use to get her to stop in our neighborhood. We ultimately settled on the idea of filming a “lip dub” which is a video that you shoot entirely backwards, but then when you actually watch the video, it plays forward (yes, it’s very confusing, we still struggle with the idea of how it works!). On Wednesday, Dec. 5th we embarked on Operation Oprah and in only 7 days, we planned, organized, spent hours running and re-running the routes around our school, dealt with the concerns from our faculty, doubt from a few of our peers, and finally on 12/12/12 we completed and launched our “lip dub” video, getting nearly 700 views by 9 PM that same day.

You can follow more of this project on Facebook at:
Facebook.com/BringOprahToBellinghamHighSchool