Battah, 17, wants to follow her passion into broadcasting

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Hanna Battah is that kid who you either tried to be like when you were her age, or who you mildly resented because you knew you never could quite be like her.

A radiant, personable and giggly girl of 17, Battah is the student council president at Tartan High School, and those around her say she is going places. She is senior who has been an active volunteer, helping her school raise thousands of dollars for cancer research. She has also served meals to the homeless.

She is captain on her high school’s swimming and diving team. She is a regional speech competition champion. She is on the track team. She participates in the National Honor Society. On top of all that, she holds down a job at a freeway coffee shop in Oakdale.

Gail Colbert, chairwoman of social studies for East Metro School District 622, says she has taught for three decades at the high school and collegiate level. Rarely has she seen a student like Battah. “She is just amazing to get everything done the way she does and still do the after-school sports and everything else,” Colbert says. “She is one of my best. She has got lots of potential.”

There are many indications of that. Battah has taken an array of Advanced Placement courses – statistics, calculus, literature and macroeconomics among them – and still maintains grades sufficient for participation in the National Honor Society. She could probably succeed in science or medicine if she wanted to, she believes. Her father, Abdalla Battah, a Mankato State University instructor, wants her to be an attorney.

But she doesn’t want any of that. Battah wants to become a broadcast journalist. She will enter the University of Missouri-Columbia journalism program later this year.

Battah knows that many consider journalists an endangered species. But she is confident she can make a mark. “I want to be that type of person that changes the way that you think about journalism,” she says. “If I follow my passion, I mean, anything can really happen.”

An industry in flux

It’s a healthy attitude. But the challenges Battah faces as a budding journalist are tremendous. Journalism is a world in flux. Newspapers, television stations, magazines and websites are struggling to make their way financially in a diffuse digital media world that caters to an infinitely distracted audience.

Battah isn’t heading in that direction blindly. She is going to a good journalism school and plans to study abroad to widen the scope of her potential. She has reached out to professionals, seeking advice from seasoned pros like Julie Nelson, the KARE 11 news anchor, with whom she has corresponded several times.

“She has given me some really excellent advice on just knowing that you need to have a background in economics, political science, world history, American history, all that stuff, if you’re going to be successful,” Battah says.

Nelson confirms that she has corresponded with Battah, as she has many aspiring young women. She is willing to offer them advice, Nelson says, but it is getting harder to do that in good conscience. She never wants to discourage a driven young person to enter the news business, but the industry’s future is unclear.

Nonetheless, Nelson believes that there will always be a need for good journalists, no matter what the news business evolves into. “It has to exist, and it will exist in some form,” Nelson says. “Really talented and hungry people will do well, and Hanna sounds like she exactly fills that bill. We’re going to need people like her.”

At this point, Battah isn’t sure what sort of broadcaster she wants to be. She plans to learn her father’s native Arabic while studying abroad, and she already speaks Spanish. She hopes to learn a few other languages besides. The one thing she knows for certain is that she wants to travel and file dispatches from places like Italy, Egypt and her father’s native Jordan, a country that she has visited.

“What mostly drew me to journalism was just being able to have those travel opportunities and being able to see the world,” she says. “There is so much out there that is not in Oakdale, Minn., that I want to be able to see.”

A voice for the silenced

However, at least part of the reason that Battah wants to be a journalist is because of what she has seen as a Minnesotan. Her father is a Muslim, and her mother, Debra, converted to Islam before they married. Battah and her three sisters also follow Islam.

That has given her a unique perspective on some of the anti-Islamic attitudes that she sometimes sees in the United States, both in person and through the media.

She says that her immigrant uncles – who along with their own families resided with the Battahs while attaining U.S. citizenship – were made to feel unwelcome when they moved to Baldwin, Wis., several years ago. Later, that same town made news when it was discovered that fireworks labeled “Run Hadji Run” were being sold in a local store. “Hadji” is a term U.S. soldiers used disparagingly in the Iraq war to label local Arabs.

Battah says her friends often don’t know that she is a Muslim, and she hasn’t made a point of telling them. Physically, she resembles the actress Natalie Portman more than she does Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistani politician who was assassinated in 2007, and she has no problems fitting in at school. That has put her occasionally in the position of a fly on the wall.

“I feel like I’ve taken for granted the fact that most people do not know my background,” she says. “I’ve heard and seen things – like at school, sports or work – that I know wouldn’t have occurred to me if I did look different.” For instance, in her coffee shop job, she has occasionally heard co-workers snidely refer to Arab customers as “towel heads.”

Recently, she says, she has taken to standing up against such remarks. That change in tone, she says, coincided with her final decision to become a journalist.

“Every single person knows and cares about someone who has suffered, but at the same time so many of us fail to change what we are,” she says. She hopes she can parlay a future position as a broadcaster to become a “voice for those who have been silenced by hatred and false labels.”

‘Quite determined’

Ultimately, her misguided co-workers figure it out. But sometimes that happens only after they have made some disparaging remark about Islam. When they realize their mistake, Battah says, she thinks they often begin to think about things differently.

“I think there are a lot of people who – I hope – have sort of changed their mind-set on how they view people because of me,” she says.

Colbert, the teacher, wonders where the girl finds enough energy to be involved in so many pursuits, excel academically at the same time, and still manage to be such an upbeat, friendly and helpful presence in her school. “She is quite determined and a very motivated kid,” Colbert says. “And she really cares.”

State Sen. Chuck Wiger, DFL-Maplewood, took notice of Battah several months ago and invited her to be a guest on his local cable access program, “Your Capitol, What’s Up?” He says he was drawn to her because of Battah’s work with High Schools Against Cancer and Relay for Life.

After watching how she handled herself on his program, Wiger believes the girl will do well in communications or any other pursuit she chooses.

“She already has done just an impressive amount of things and her future is so bright,” Wiger says. “I have no doubt that Hanna is going to make very good things happen in this world.”

The Battah File

Name: Hanna Battah

Job: Senior, Tartan High School, Oakdale, Minn.; student council president; Caribou Coffee barista

Lives in: Lake Elmo

Grew up in: Lake Elmo

Family: Father, Abdalla; mother, Debra. Three sisters, Anisa, 24; Nadia, 23; and Leena, 13

Career ambition: To become a broadcast journalist

Hobbies: Most are sports-related, she says. Last summer she participated in the regional St. Croix River Triathlon and placed first for girls in her 18 and under age group. “That was a huge, huge excitement or me because it combined my favorite two hobbies, which are running and swimming.”