If you go up into the 600s and look across the hall from the Guidance Office, you will find a small office labeled “Tech Office”. When you enter the room, you’ll find the walls covered in hockey memorabilia, a wall-mounted TV playing a slideshow with all of the principals and assistant principals in the school district, and two Apple desktops most likely opened up to Final Cut Pro. You’ve just entered the office of Londonderry Nations’ very own John Beaulieu, the school district Media Director. Beaulieu, or JB as many may know him, has been working for the school district for over 23 years. “It seems like it was only 3 years for me,” Beaulieu said.
When Beaulieu first started working here at Lancer Nation, he never expected to come this far. When he was first hired here by the school district, his full-time job was in sports broadcasting, which he continued to do while working for the school district on the side as a part-time job.
“The reason why I actually applied those 23 years ago was because at the time I was doing sports [broadcasting], and sports happen on weekends and nights and I had a lot of time off during the week,” Beaulieu said. “And I said, jeez I have all of this time off during the week, maybe I can do something and then this job just popped up and said hey we’re doing this new television course here at Londonderry and we could use someone with creating that course and kind of doing some of the content creation and I said perfect, I got the whole week off!”
Beaulieu has done work with many sports teams over the years, but at the time that he started working here for the Londonderry School District, he was working as the Technical Director for the Manchester Monarchs and helped set up the broadcasting department in the SNHU Arena.
“There was so much to do,” Beaulieu said. “So much going on. Basically just working with the curriculum and teachers. And then we did this newscast with the 5th graders, we did all kinds of fun, fun stuff. So I found that doing my regular job, which was my full-time job doing sports on the weekends and then doing curriculum content here at the high school was a really good fit.”
He continued to work in sports broadcasting until 2010 when he began to transition to working full-time for the school district before ceasing his work for the sports broadcasting industry completely in 2017.
However though Beaulieu was no longer working for professional sports teams, he was not done with sports broadcasting just yet. Many are familiar with the Londonderry High School and Londonderry Athletics YouTube channels and the live streams of all varsity games here at LHS. What few people know, though, is that the person behind the start of those live streams is Beaulieu.
“We started to do football, then we started to do basketball,” Beaulieu said. “It was curriculum before then, but it was in 2010 that I started to reinvent my job and go into those areas.”
The sports live streams aren’t the only thing that Beaulieu has started here in the Londonderry School District. Almost all LHS students have fond memories of the 5th grade newscast, and it was John Beaulieu who began the filming of those newscasts. What started as just one class at North School transformed into the elementary school-wide project that it is today.
“[The newscast] involves a lot of real-world skills I thought. I think that’s one of the things that I’m kind of proud of us that we grew this program like that and went from one thing right to the other,” Beaulieu said.
After high school, Beaulieu attended Emerson College in Boston, in what at the time was their fledging media and broadcasting department, and graduated as part of the class of 1984. “I started working for TV stations cause at that time there wasn’t a lot of cable content,” Beaulieu said. “And so then when I graduated, cable television blew up, sports broadcasting blew up with cable and the opportunities were there to continue with that as a career.”
Besides his love of hockey and media, Beaulieu is a family man. Beaulieu has been married for “a long time”. He and his wife have been married for over 32 years.
While Beaulieu and his wife have never had kids of their own, they are far from short on family. Beaulieu has a total of 48 nieces and nephews, and 12 great-nieces and nephews, and is set to become a great-great-uncle. Out of his siblings, Beaulieu is the middle child of eight.
“My brothers and sisters did a really good job at having lots of kids, and I love having that. I just went golfing last week with one of my nephews whose actually a graduate from Londonderry High School,” said Beaulieu.
Over the years of his working here at LHS, the media curriculum has faltered and is now no longer offered. However, Beaulieu has brought back the media curriculum with his new multimedia class this year.
Over the summer, Beaulieu has been working to assemble a new syllabus to return this great class to LHS. His new class is currently offered as a half-year course where he will be working to teach students important skills to work in the media industry such as editing with programs like Adobe Premiere, live streaming, creating graphics, OBS, and organizing media projects.
As part of this course, Beaulieu and Mrs. Sullivan have combined forces to create a newscast that will be published monthly. They plan for the project to be entirely student-led and for all of the ideas for what the newscast will become to be determined by students.
“[Our] goal is to get media as a curriculum as a choice for our students. And one of those things that inspires me to do that is because I was one of those students.” Beaulieu said.
“When I was in highschool, I took a television production class. And I have to say I really enjoyed it, didn’t think I was going to go into it when I was in highschool as a field. However, when I graduated from high school I was thinking about what I liked most in highschool. Out of the curriculum that was offered at that time that was television production.”
Beaulieu hopes to bring his love and passion for media to his students as he brings back the once-strong media curriculum here to LHS to help students prepare and experience firsthand what working in the media industry is like and learn the joys of content creation.
