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 and two Apple desktops, most likely opened up to Final Cut Pro.
You’ve just entered the office of John Beaulieu, the school district’s very own Media Director.
Beaulieu, or JB, has worked for the school district for over 23 years.
“It seems like it was only three years for me,” Beaulieu said.
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 because 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, having 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.
When Beaulieu first started working for the district, he never expected to come this far. When he was first hired, he was working in sports broadcasting as the Technical Director for the Manchester Monarchs in the SNHU Arena.
However, since games often happen on the weekends and at night, so he wanted to find something else he could do on the side, “then this job just popped up” according to Beaulieu.
This job was a brand new television course in Londonderry. With the district’s prior broadcasting specialists shifting their focus to curriculum, it left a spot open for a new person to step into the role of content creator.
“There was so much to do. So much going on,” Beaulieu said. “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 part-time at the school until 2010 when he began the transition to full-time. “It was in 2010 that I started to reinvent my job,” Beaulieu said.
Beaulieu would continue in his role as Technical Director at the SNHU arena until 2017 after which he would begin to work full-time at the district.
Though Beaulieu was no longer working for professional sports teams, he was not done with sports broadcasting. 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 is that the person behind those live streams is Beaulieu.
What started as just livestreams of the football games, spread to basketball, and eventually became the program that it is today.
The sports live streams aren’t the only thing that can be accredited to Beaulieu. 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,” Beaulieu said. “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.”
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.
“When I was in high school, 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 high school as a field. However, when I graduated from high school I was thinking about what I liked most in high school. 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.
“[Our] goal is to get media as a curriculum as a choice for our students,” Beaulieu said. “And one of those things that inspires me to do that is because I was one of those students.”
