ORONO – For nearly a decade, aspiring journalists in Maine high schools have received instruction, encouragement and inspiration from the Maine Center for Student Journalism at the University of Maine.

Its founding director, UMaine associate professor of journalism Kathryn Olmstead, will be honored by the New England Scholastic Press Association with a special award for her work in developing this statewide resource May 3 at an annual conference in Boston. NESPA is based in Boston University’s College of Communication.

“This is a special award, and it is to honor her for her work in founding and working with Maine’s scholastic press,” said Helen Smith, NESPA’s executive director. “Kathryn Olmstead has done an amazing job raising the sights of student journalists in this region. She has introduced them to new possibilities and stretched their imaginations.”

Olmstead founded the Maine Center for Journalism in 1993 with the goals of fostering the practice and teaching of journalism in Maine secondary schools.

The center’s activities include an annual statewide conference, regional roundtables, a newsletter, a newspaper contest, and a speakers bureau for high school classes and staffs. The center is part of the department of communication and journalism and is funded with a grant from the Maine Daily Newspaper Publishers Association.

The conference has become the centerpiece of the center’s activities. This year’s event, “Freedom Under Attack: Student Journalism in a New World,” is set for May 15 at UMaine and will feature guest speakers Mike Hiestand, a staff attorney for the Student Press Law Center in Washington, and Roger Catlin, an arts writer for the Hartford Courant.

The conference is open to all schools, and past events have drawn students from Fort Kent to Wells. Some 50 schools in Maine currently produce newspapers.

“We never would have been able to put out the quality of student newspaper that we do without the conference and the student newspaper contest,” said Bangor High School English teacher Junita Drisko, the adviser for the Bangor High newspaper, Ram-Page.”The students work all year to produce papers that can win state awards. So in that sense, Kathryn Olmstead keeps the students motivated all year long,” Drisko said.

Olmstead said that her experiences as a high school English teacher 1971-1974 at Concord High School in Concord, N.H., helped her realize the importance of nurturing young journalists.

“Being an adviser for a student newspaper is a thankless job sometimes. I hoped that the activities of the Maine Center for Journalism would provide support at the university level for teachers and students throughout the state,” Olmstead said.

Olmstead joined the faculty at UMaine in 1984. In 1988 she co-founded “Echoes: Rediscovering Community,” an international journal featuring rural culture. Olmstead continues to edit and publish the journal, a quarterly with a circulation of 4,000.