Audio/Video Productions is the second class in the Broadcasting pathway offered at Mt. Vernon High School. For the past 39 years, Mr. Shaver has been the sole teacher of the program.
In the class, students use the skills they learned in Principles of Broadcasting to make higher quality and more complex projects such as video podcasts with a two camera setup, sports talkshows, and advertisements/promo videos. To do so, they use programs from “Adobe” such as “Premiere Pro,” “After Effects” and “Photoshop.” Through these programs and the stellar teaching of Mr. Shaver, students accurately recreate a professional post-production environment to prepare them for the future if they choose this as their career.
It is not just software that is provided to the students though, but also a bunch of professionally-used recording hardware, a studio near the auditorium that provides the perfect place to record many of the projects and the entire high school campus to use as a setting. With these resources, students recreate a professional production environment to also help prepare them for that possible future.
Pre-production is also a vital part of the curriculum, featuring many aspects of the actual profession like script writing, storyboarding, casting and planning when and where to record. All of these environment recreations work together to help each student both learn where they excel in the world of broadcasting and choose where to lead their lives and careers.
Also, the curriculum is not all state standards set by people who do not know what actually takes place in the world of media production. According to an email from Mr. Shaver, “The curriculum is a hybrid, some state standards with lots of Mr. Shaver enhancement.”
Many of the video projects created in the class are posted to the Tom Shaver YouTube channel. Here, some videos find success, like the 2022 Lip Dub Music Video that reached nearly 100k views.
The 2025-2026 school year is Mr. Shaver’s last year teaching before he retires, which means a brand-new teacher with brand-new ideas will take over in the next school year. This is a net positive for the program, as such a field strives for constant new ideas. It also means that for current students of the Audio/Video Productions class, they will most likely be able to take the third year class of the program called Mass Media Production with the new teacher.
