Five Mehlville School District journalism students won national write-off competition awards at the recent Journalism Education Association Fall Convention in Nashville, Tenn.

More than 5,000 students from all across America, Canada, England and Brazil attended the four-day conference.

Mehlville High School had five members of the Student Prints newspaper staff attend the conference. Oakville High School sent a combined 11 students from the Prowl newspaper and Tiger Paw yearbook staffs.

A total of 1,988 students entered the write-off contests with 626 earning awards.

The write-off contests lasted roughly two hours, with each student allowed to enter only one competition. Schools also were limited to one entrant per category. Awards were presented to entries judged as Superior, Excellent or Honorable Mention.

Oakville High senior Abby Frederich won an Excellent Award in the Yearbook Layout: Theme category.

Earning Honorable-Mention Awards from Oakville were: junior Amy Richter (News Writing), junior Anthony Vitale (Yearbook Clubs Copy and Captions) and senior Kristen Bereswill (Yearbook Student Life Photography).

Earning an Excellent Award in the NewsWriting category was senior Jeff Sachs of Mehlville High.

Students traveling to the convention attended learning sessions in newspaper, yearbook, photojournalism, design, broadcast, advertising and leadership.

Jeff Kuchno is the Oakville High yearbook and newspaper adviser. Mehlville High’s newspaper adviser is Erin Moeckel.