With the celebration of Charter Day 2026 and the 176th anniversary of Waynesburg University’s charter, Waynesburg Community Television (WCTV) began uploading a special Charter Day series. The first episode is titled “The Preparation and History of Waynesburg Charter.”

This special mini-series was produced and fully developed through COM 302 Television Studio Production. The purpose and intent behind the course are to further develop the studio productions that WCTV offers.

“We wanted to come up with something really different,” Department of Communication Chair Richard Krause said. “It’s a very hands-on, application-based course.”

Krause explained that the course not only produces pieces of content such as this one, but they also analyze other broadcast or TV media sources, hoping to help implement enhancements to WCTV and other productions.

The Charter Day Special is a two-part special with the first episode being everything prior to Charter Day including the history of the event. The video has digitized clips from VHS tapes of previous events and contains bits and pieces of multiple previous Charter Day events through pictures.

The video also covers the special Charter Day Chicken which students look forward to every year.

The special also has a sit-down interview with President Douglas G. Lee conducted by freshman sports announcing major Stone Manges.

“I went through the process of going down to Miller Hall to his office and setting up an appointment with his secretary,” Manges said. “President Lee coming up to the studio was so nice and a very seamless process and he gave some great responses to my questions.”

President Lee talked about the impact of Charter Day, the importance for students, and Charter Day memories.

The class, although being a 300-level course, has students from the freshman level such as Manges, all the way to the senior level, with senior Ethan Spozarski, the producer for “Plead Your Case,” WCTV’s national sports debate show.

“For me, I am taking the class to see what I can do to better my content,” Spozarski said.

The class was broken up into two different groups to make it special. One group was for the history of Charter Day and the other was to preview this year’s Charter Day.

“My group sat down and thought about what the major hitting points of what we needed to talk about,” Spozarski said. “There are many things that are important; Charter Day Chicken is obviously one of them even though on the real totem pole it is probably at the bottom.”

This is just the midterm project for the course with the final project being an original studio show produced by the class that has never been done before in WCTV.

“All in all, it’s a studio production,” Krause said. “We are looking at good production values and we give feedback accordingly to be better.”

The Charter Day series can be viewed on WCTV’s YouTube channel, WCTV Waynesburg.