When Greenlee Clark was a sixth grader at Toledo Middle School, she was told repeatedly by leadership teacher Jeff Davis that she needed to pursue a career in broadcasting.
In Davis’ eyes back in 2015 and 2016, Clark had all the qualifying traits. She was a strong public speaker, she was friendly and kind to everyone, and she was outgoing and unafraid to speak up for herself and others. He could see all of those characteristics even before he had Clark in any of his classes.
Nearly a decade later, Clark has proved Davis’ judgment to be right even more than he could imagine.
Clark, a 2022 Toledo High School graduate and 2025 Grand Canyon University graduate, is entering her third month as a reporter and multimedia journalist at KIVI-TV, known as Idaho News 6, working as a neighborhood reporter covering Star, Eagle and Emmett.
But back in middle school, Clark repeatedly brushed off Davis’ vision of her being on television, responding that she wanted to be a teacher when she grew up. She was handpicked by Davis to be part of his leadership class as a seventh grader, and her desire to teach only grew as she was mentored by him.
Clark, born in Longview but raised in Toledo, assembled an impressive resume even before she moved up to high school, serving as the Associated Student Body (ASB) class representative before leading the school as the ASB president in eighth grade. Once she got to Toledo High School, she competed in soccer, basketball and softball while serving as ASB president for her final three years.
But once the world seemingly came to a halt amid the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, in the middle of her sophomore year at Toledo High School, Clark’s perspective changed.
“I quickly realized with everything going on in the world, I did not want to go into teaching, not because of anything specific that any of my teachers did, but more because it was like, ‘Wow, there’s so much happening in the world. How can I be a voice and make an impact?’” Clark said.
Ahead of her senior year of high school, Clark came up with the idea to launch a podcast called “Life With Green,” marking her official debut into broadcasting. She also dabbled with public speaking as the ASB president and announced at sporting events, but the podcast was her first crack at professional journalism, although she didn’t know it would be at the time as a 17-year-old.
“It was just a podcast about my life. I would talk about topics that I thought resonated with me, and I would share my experience about that topic and how I as a 17-year-old would navigate through the experience I just went through if I were to go through it again,” Clark said. “My goal with it was to get better at talking into a microphone and being a real, authentic broadcaster.”
The first episode of “Life With Green” dropped in September 2021, and Davis called Clark the day it was released to give her his praise and his critiques.
“He told me, ‘Keep it up. This is going to play a really huge part in your future.’ So then I started to switch my mindset to, ‘OK, I don’t want to be a teacher anymore. I think I want to go into broadcasting,’” Clark said.
Clark admitted that her senior year of high school was difficult emotionally and socially, and even though she loved the small town of Toledo and the Pacific Northwest, she felt it was time to spread her wings elsewhere while chasing her broadcasting dreams.
After graduating from Toledo in 2022, Clark attended Grand Canyon University in Phoenix to pursue a degree in communications with an emphasis in broadcasting and new media. The new beginnings in the nation’s fifth-most populous city were difficult from the start, however.
“I wanted to leave after the first semester. I experienced a couple of panic attacks, which had never happened before, and just had some health things going on,” Clark said. “I still kept up with ‘Life With Green,’ which was very therapeutic. I was constantly sharing my experience at GCU and trying to still encourage people that even though I was going through it, there was still good in the world and good in the season of life that I was living in.”
In her second semester, Clark hit the ground running to kickstart the next chapter of her broadcasting career. She was one of the founding members of GCU’s Future Broadcasters Club (FBC), taking on the roles of anchor, reporter and executive producer. Inspired by an Arizona-based radio show called Johnjay and Rich that she and her sister listened to every day on the way to school, Clark was intent on pursuing the radio avenue in broadcasting.
“When I looked into broadcasting, I wanted to go into radio. Looking back on my life, this radio show played such a major impact in my life without me even realizing it,” she said.
Clark said she was the only student interested in radio in the FBC. When she came home after her freshman year of college, she worked as an intern for KUKN Radio in Kelso. In her second year, she was a leader with the FBC while working for the school’s intramural sports as a site supervisor and worked as a nanny, along with school work. Clark applied for the role of FBC president toward the end of her sophomore year and got it.
While she practiced different reporting skills, she always called the man who rooted for her broadcasting success before she even wanted to be a broadcaster — the man she still calls Mr. Davis.
“I called Mr. Davis every single time, and every single time he would tell me how proud of me he was, and then he would be like, ‘OK, now this is what you should work on,’” Clark said. “He told me to watch people on newscasts, work on my writing and work on space fillers. I would take his advice and write it on sticky notes and put them on my door.”
She started a second internship with KJZZ Radio News in Tempe, Arizona. Around this time, many people in her circle, including Davis, told Clark that she should look into a career in television rather than radio. Similarly to when she was in middle school, Clark felt she knew what she wanted to do and brushed those comments away. But after her radio internship, she learned that the storytelling she wanted to accomplish was not as possible under the radio umbrella as she once thought.
“I learned very quickly through radio that you have to be able to tell a story in a lot shorter amount of time while being detailed but also not being so detailed to where it doesn’t sound conversational,” Clark said. “That’s what made me realize I wanted to go into TV because you get to go into more depth. With radio, it felt like there just wasn’t as much heart. For me, being so connected to people that I was chatting with, I wanted to tell so much of their story and I was limited to 15 to 30 seconds and it killed me. I wanted to be more of a voice than just 15 seconds.”
Clark’s next step was an internship at FOX 10 in Phoenix as a senior capstone before graduating in April. She perfected her broadcasting reel to send to around 10 news stations, primarily in Idaho, and she had four interviews with Idaho News 6, and she got the job and started working in June.
“Idaho News 6 has treated me amazing. It feels super surreal to be here in Boise and to live what I dreamed about for so long,” Clark said. “Every day is such a blessing. I feel incredibly grateful to be here.”
Davis, who was also Clark’s softball coach for her senior season, still calls her after watching her newscasts and even visited her in Boise recently. He joked that the critique list is growing shorter with each review.
“I’ll give her a call and I’ll say, ‘First of all, here’s a lot of the good things that I saw from you, and here’s some things I noticed that maybe you could do to get even better,” Davis said. “It’s getting harder, to be honest, to find the fault in what she does. That’s still the teacher in me. She knows I have her best interest at heart. She’s definitely one of a kind.”
Clark credited Davis for believing in her and for being a consistent mentor for her over the past decade. She hopes to someday become an anchor but is enjoying being a reporter and succeeding in the destiny Davis instilled in her as a sixth grader. She believes her childhood dream of teaching could still be in the cards as she said she would like to pass her passion for journalism and storytelling on to future generations.
“A lot of who I am today as a person, student, friend and broadcaster is because of him. I took every opportunity to learn from him and be coached by him,” Clark said. “I wouldn’t be the leader and public speaker I am today without him. He’s been such a big part in this journey. Seeing all the different people that he’s gotten to impact and how much he’s done in his teaching career, I think it would be so cool to do that for someone else.”
