GCNN or, Glenwood Cable News Network, was created in 1984. Glenwood was contacted by the Illinois State Board and was asked if the high school wanted to be a pilot school in some new programs. Glenwood said yes, and was one of ten high schools to start four new programs. One of these areas was communications. A teacher named Ron Schwermin decided to teach this part and GCNN was born.

GCNN had to go through very humble beginnings. In the first year, they had to borrow the cameras from the sports department. This was pretty much all the technology they had available to them at that time. The first shows were of fake news programs with paper clocks and a road map with graphics on the wall used for weather forecasts. The students in the class would tape their shows and they never got out of the studio. They had no means to broadcast their shows to the public.          At the end of the first year, they did a show in front of several people including someone from the State Journal Register. That got them a front page article in the paper, Soon after that, the superintendent asked if they had their own equipment, whether they would be able to do more. That fall they got their own equipment and they were off and running. At that time they moved a lot to find the best place. They were filming in the back of the drafting room, metal shop, and the wood shop. In 1988, they got their very own news set. They used the plans from WICS and built their own set. They had two editing rooms and even got their set air conditioned. This was a big deal since the rest of the building would get smoldering hot in the warmer months. GCNN was on the rise. By this time, CASS Cable invested in the network by assigning them channel 23. Now they were producing their own shows and broadcasting them to all of Chatham.

After giving the owner of CASS Cable a demo tape of what GCNN could do, a decision was made to wire all of the sports facilities so GCNN could go beyond their set and move to live sports shows.

       GCNN is now entering a new stage with the hiring of Ryan Bandy who takes over as coordinator of the program for the retiring Ron Schwermin. Bandy plans to continue the program in the direction that Schwermin has led it for over 20 years. Future plans include DVD authoring and program archives available on the Internet.