Education Week - March 11, 2020 - 11

| CITIZEN Z

Educators Walk Fine Line as They
Nudge Teenage Voters to the Polls
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9

Avoiding Community Conflict
But incorporating voting opportunities into
schools can create a minefield.
Greensboro's program has sparked heated dissent from community members, including Linda
Wellborn, the school board's vice chairwoman, who
argued that the field trips would "cause chaos in the
learning environment."
In a long post that launched a 300-comment
flame war on Facebook, Wellborn voiced concern
that the field trips included any voting-eligible student, not just those in social studies or civics classes,
and that the excursions would be a "waste of time
and loss of learning" if students forgot the documents they needed to register. She also worried that
students could be pressured to vote for particular
candidates at the polls, saying: "This has been haphazardly put together in a hurry, and I have to ask
what is the aim of this effort-is it really civics, or is
there some other purpose?"
Dozens of other commenters argued over similar
concerns, often with more colorful language.
Jonathan Permar, the district's social studies
lead and the voting coordinator for the project,
said the civics field trips have been in the works
for months and followed the same approval and
parent-permission processes as all the district's
field trips. The program included all eligible students because some may have already taken civics, he said, so "you can't make it a course-specific
trip; otherwise, you risk disenfranchising a large

Eamon Queeney for Education Week

that [voting] process, presenting in class about the
importance of voting and registering to vote, demonstrating a practical process of filling out voterregistration forms, ... and then encouraging them to
learn about contemporary political issues," Holbein
said. "And it really works."
In Greensboro, Superintendent Sharon Contreras said the state requires each high school to keep
voter-registration materials on hand, have voter coordinators on campus, and seek to register students
to vote. The field trips started this year, partly in response to a new civic-literacy law that specifically
requires voter instruction. The excursions are voluntary; any student who would be 18 by the general
election can opt in.
Justin Scarbro, an Advanced Placement government teacher at Page High, said the new civics
education program has made him rethink his own
practice. Of 130 students in five classes, he found,
students knew virtually nothing about voting before
he started preparing for the field trips.
"Even until, like, two days ago, there was confusion that you could go vote in the primary at 17. Just
knowing when you can register-they don't know
that, or, you know, how easy registering is," he said.
"They don't know a lot of things that seem like simple knowledge, but for whatever reason, the access
to it has just not been provided on a grand scale.
And that's my fault because I've been teaching government for 10 years, so I'm as guilty as anybody for
not being better at my job."
The process also spurred conversations about
other voting barriers students face. After helping
one student look up his polling place, Scarbro noticed it was miles farther from the student's house
than Scarbro had to travel to his own polling place.
"The distance to his polling place seemed abnormally long," Scarbro said. "I wondered if that were
the case for more kids who came from low-income
situations. I thought about that and I was, like, if it
weren't for this [trip], he would have to get creative
about how he got to the polls."

ABOVE: James B. Dudley
High School juniors Christian
Arrington, right, and Terry
Smalls register to vote at
North Carolina Agricultural
and Technical State
University in Greensboro.
A bus from Walter Hines
Page High School arrives at
Greensboro's Bur-Mil Club
polling station. More than
850 students from 28
Guilford County Schools took
the school-sponsored field
trips to vote early in the
primary election.

Project, which monitors compliance with the law.
That's a 20 percentage-point increase from 2017,
but Stephanie Gomez, the high school campaign
coordinator for the group, said she thinks the
number of districts helping students register could
have been higher.
Texas districts, like those in many other states,
face confusing rules about who is responsible and
how schools can support and prepare students.
The confusion in Texas stems in part from a nonbinding opinion issued in 2018 by Texas Attorney
General Ken Paxton. It said school districts could
not transport students to polls "absent an educational purpose." The opinion followed concerns
that educators would try to influence students'
choices.
"It's not that principals or school districts are trying to be negligent or that they are actively not trying to uphold this part of the law," Gomez said. But,
she added, "there's a lot of fear that doing anything
more than just handing the student a card for registering is a partisan stance."
In Greensboro, students brought little awareness
of the adult fight over their field trips but they did
bring a wide array of their own political leanings
and issues of concern to the early-voting polls.
Alejandro Ibrahim of Page High said he regularly
discusses news and politics with his parents and
leads a 60-student group dedicated to getting more
of his classmates to register.
Joey Hennen was "doing his homework" the
night before the Page field trip, looking up candidates and their positions, he said. Joey pointed to
North Carolina's recent move to increase the age
for buying tobacco from 18 to 21 as one local debate
that needed teenagers' input. But he and classmate
Pierce Hudson said they are more likely to gauge
national candidates by their stances on abortion
and gun restrictions.
Across town, where the students from James B.
Dudley High School cast their ballots in a college
building of the same name, Nashon Wilhite had
one straightforward political concern this cycle:
jobs.
"The minimum wage affects a lot of people
around our age," Nashon said.

Looking Ahead

number of students in the district." The district
worked with principals to incorporate the program
into other senior-level courses, such as English, as
well as social studies.
"Having eligible U.S. citizens who happen to be
high school students vote, it's neither unethical nor
is it illegal," said Superintendent Contreras.
"One thing that saddens me, to be quite frank,
is that, on one hand, we're very negative about
our young people, about our high school students,
about college students, the students that fall in
that 18- to 21-age range-that they're apathetic,
they don't participate-but when we eliminate the
very barriers that have been identified that keep
them from voting, suddenly there's this pushback," she said.
"Our board has a mission that says we are preparing students for citizenship. You don't prepare them
for citizenship just by having them sit and learn
about the Whigs and the Tories and history from
200 years ago," Contreras added. "You encourage
them to actively participate, and that's what we're
doing. That's what a democracy is."
Guilford County is not alone in facing the tension
that can bubble up in response to school voter-registration efforts.
Since 1985, Texas has required all of its more
than 2,800 high schools to provide voter-registration cards to eligible students twice a year, but as
of last year, only 34 percent of 232 counties with
public high schools that enroll at least 20 seniors
had done so, according to the Texas Civil Rights

ABOUT THE CITIZEN Z
PROJECT
U.S. public education is rooted
in the belief by early American
leaders that the most important knowledge to impart to
young people is what it means
to be a citizen. If America is
experiencing a civic crisis, as
many say it is, schools may
well be failing at that job.
This article is part of an
ongoing effort by Education
Week to understand the role
of education in preparing the
next generation of citizens. See
other stories in the Citizen Z
series:
> www.edweek.org/go/
CitizenZ
Do you have a great idea for
teaching students about
civics?
Share it with us:
www.edweek.org/go/
civics-ideas

The 18- and 19-year-old voter turnout across
42 states hit "historic high" numbers for the 2018
midterms. More than 28 percent of Americans ages
18 to 29 voted that year-more than double the
13 percent who voted in the 2014 midterms. That
increase was driven in part by the 23 percent of
18- and 19-year-olds voting in the wave of student
activism that followed high-profile school shootings, including the massacre at Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., according to
a separate study by CIRCLE.
Educators hope to sustain that civic engagement
with programs like Guilford County's, to give students more practical and hands-on instruction on
voting and the elections process.
CIRCLE estimated that young voters have a high
potential to affect competitive gubernatorial and
congressional races in swing states such as Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin, among
others. Political watchers likewise think teenagers
and 20-somethings could tip the balance in the
2020 presidential elections-if they vote.
Dudley students and teachers consider voter education a part of the school's historic legacy of student engagement; Dudley was the first black high
school in the state, and it was central to the first
high-school-led sit-in during the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
"Before the civil rights [movement], we [black
people] had the right but we didn't have the opportunity to vote," Summers said. "Now that we
have the opportunity to vote, ... every vote counts,
even the kids' votes. Everybody has their own opinions, but for your opinions to be heard and make a
change, you have to come in and vote."

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Education Week - March 11, 2020

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