Ginn Academy sophomore Eugene Johnson insists he’s “not really a part of the photography club” at his school. 

Terrance Coursen, the teacher who started the club, disagrees. 

“Yeah he is,” Coursen quipped. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”

Either way, Johnson has played a huge part in the club, dubbed RePhocus, and its latest project: Ginn Academy’s first-ever student magazine. For the last few months, he and a handful of other students have been distilling their thoughts on topics such as the school’s culture and youth civic engagement into stories and photographs for the magazine. 

That’s how Johnson found his way to RePhocus in the first place. He played football for a little while because he felt social pressure to do so, he said. In his free time, though, he’s a prolific writer. He’s already written about 12 novels, he said.

“Ever since I quit football, people mostly act like that was the only way to get out of high school and be successful,” Johnson said. “I want to prove to them that that’s not the only way. You can be successful doing other things that you want to do.”

‘Feels like home’ 

RePhocus and the magazine, tentatively named the Ginn Academy Times, are both a long time coming for Coursen, who teaches health at Ginn Academy. The all boys’ school, part of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, enrolls about 300 students. It’s located in Cleveland’s Collinwood neighborhood. 

Coursen has been working to build out more photography programming at Ginn Academy for about three years, he said, and it’s starting to catch on. Getting a solid and consistent photography mentor was the hardest part, Coursen said, but he found one in Ruddy Roye, a photographer and educator. 

“He’s the saving grace of our photography program,” Coursen said. 

Coursen connected with Roye through the Cleveland Print Room, a local photography-focused nonprofit that also provided digital and film cameras for RePhocus. 

(Note: Signal Cleveland’s Michael Indriolo was selected as a grant recipient for the Cleveland Print Room’s ongoing Property Inventory project.)

Roye is renowned for his documentary photography with bylines in international publications and shows at prestigious galleries. He moved to the Cleveland area from New York City a few years back. 

Teaching the Ginn students “feels like home,” Roye said. “When I look at these kids, they’re my sons.”

Roye came up with the idea for a magazine because he wants the young men at Ginn Academy to have a platform to weigh in on social trends and issues — local and national — that impact them, he said. He wants to pass on the skills he’s learned throughout his career. 

“They have voices. I’m not giving them voices,” he said. “You’re equipping that voice with storytelling, with a vision, with a way to demand their footing.”

Ginn Academy sophomore Kalib Walton joined RePhocus because he was interested in sports photography, but after going on a trip to the state capitol through the Cleveland Metropolitan School District’s Civics 2.0 program, he started thinking more about government and politics. 

Walton decided that’s what he wanted to write about for the magazine. He wants to encourage people his age to think more about how policy decisions on things such as tariffs and healthcare could impact their daily lives.  

“My grandmother’s always telling me, ‘Pay attention to the government,’” he said. “When I actually did, it’s fascinating how what’s going on today could really affect my life down the road.”

Arts expand at Ginn Academy

RePhocus and the student magazine are just pieces of a broader push to expand media and arts programming at Ginn Academy. Coursen and Principal Damon Holmes worked together to turn an empty classroom into a digital arts lab with cameras and professional equipment to produce music and podcasts. They even created a greenscreen by painting one of the classroom’s walls. 

Holmes, an educator for more than 20 years, has seen public school budgets tighten and arts programs struggle to keep up, he said, but he values the arts as an important outlet for students.

“The creative aspect of all our kids’ minds gives them an opportunity to dream,” Holmes said. “If we take that away, then we can’t really tap their full potential.”

More than an outlet, he sees arts such as photography, for example, as a way to practically apply concepts from science and math. 

Martez Gullatt, a sophomore in RePhocus, remembers seeing his aunt with a camera throughout his childhood. He would look through all her photos, curious about how the camera worked, he said. 

“The technology of the camera,” he said. “It can hold so many memories inside one little chip, or you could print it out, and you can have so many memories along your lifetime.”

Gullatt wants to explore photography as a career, he said, so he sees working on the RePhocus magazine as a way to get some experience in the field. 

“Working on this magazine would, nine times out of 10, benefit all of us,” he said. “Getting young Black men out there publishing their work and making something great for us, it’s not every day we get an opportunity like this.”