Today, Schools Newspapers Online (SNO) selected junior Sarah Mohammed, senior Lucy Ge, sophomore Olivia Xu and junior Isha Moorjani’s Harker Aquila longform on Afghanistan for a Best of SNO award. The piece, which covers the struggles of Afghan people following the U.S. military’s exit from Afghanistan, includes interviews with Marjan Naderi, 2020 D.C. Youth Poet Laureate, and Dr. Mejgan Massoumi, a teaching fellow at Stanford’s Civic, Liberal and Global Education Program, who moved to the U.S. from Afghanistan in the early 1980s.

The story also gathers student reactions to the crisis and surveys the many reactions to the exit, both positive and negative. Work on the piece began at the start of the school year, and the finished article is the result of eight months of collaboration among its reporters. In addition to the Best of SNO award, the story was also published on the Best of SNO website, a recognition reserved for less than 10 percent of the submissions SNO receives every week.

Last month, SNO also recognized Aquila as a 2022 Distinguished Site for meeting quality standards in several criteria, including story page design, writing and multimedia.