Jeremy Head
Nome

Essay Topic: How can our schools move students towards civic responsibility, i.e., becoming voters, increasing awareness of local, state, and national governments and political issues, and understanding the relationship of our history to current situations?

On January 12th, 2010, the Nome School Board voted three-to-two not to renew the contracts of Mrs. Janeen Sullivan, our Principal, and Mr. Doug Boyer, our Assistant Principal. They are both highly thought of among students and faculty at Nome Beltz High School. Within a day, various student groups were meeting to decide what action should be taken. Fliers made by one student almost immediately flooded the school. They were seen at most corners of the school, encouraging students to attend the next board meeting and urge the board members to rescind their vote. A Facebook page titled, “I Support Boyer, I Support Sullivan,” was created by a student and currently has 283 fans. In light of what we considered to be a bad situation, our classmates definitely rallied together to advocate for a common cause.

Kids our age are generally selfish. Unfortunately, we don’t seem to care about an issue unless it affects us. So why did we feel that it was our civic duty to come to the support of our administrators? One reason surely must be that these two administrators have demonstrated over and over again that they care about “us;” “us” being the entire student body. The natural response when this situation arose was to care about “them.” Many students attended and spoke at the next school board meeting.

I believe our high school has also helped guide students to a greater civic responsibility by creating a climate that has allowed and encouraged students to respectfully question procedures or decisions. Proactively, we have had students on committees that help form procedures for each school year’s handbook. And the students have been treated with a great amount of respect and consideration each time. This empowers students in a respectful, process driven manner. Then, even as young adults, when we see decisions made by a school board that aren’t following process and are not performance based, we recognize injustice and feel responsible to respond.

I also believe in order to get us motivated to a higher level of civic responsibility, it is crucial that we are taught the importance of our vote. We learn that as we vote for our class representatives and student body leaders. Our teachers have also pointed out that our elected officials have a great deal of power over us. At the state and national levels, they make laws for us to abide by and decide what national taxes we will pay. At a local level, our elected officials decide how much our city is going to fund our school district and what city sales taxes we have to pay.

In the words of Phillip E. Johnson, “A constitutional democracy is in serious trouble if its citizenry does not have a certain degree of education and civic virtue.” Our students can be educated in numerous ways. There are government classes, student leadership positions, committees, sports teams and clubs that can educate and empower students. Our student body Vice-President also serves on the school board as a non-voting member, but certainly a voice for the students. Unfortunately, civic virtue can’t be taught in a semester, or even a year. Hopefully, some foundation has been taught in the home. Beyond that, civic virtue is taught in schools, by example, as our teachers and administrators supervise canned food drives, budget for the support of clubs such as “Rachel’s Challenge,” or treat students with respect and compassion. We have also had the former House of Representative, Richard Foster, visit our school and teach us the responsibilities of constituency and art of persuasion. A former U.S. Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, visited our school several years ago and we learned the importance of respectfully educating our appointed officials of their federal decisions and the impact on specific sites in remote Alaska.

According to Edmund Burke, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Regarding the recent school board issue, the students of Nome Beltz High School certainly did more than nothing. We started action groups, Facebook pages, fliers around school and attended school board meetings. As young people approaching the age of 18, we registered to vote. We tackled this negative situation with a positive response. We have learned many lessons and our understanding of civic responsibility has increased. We may or may not agree with the final decisions and results, but we will always be able to agree that we demonstrated our civic responsibility swiftly, thoroughly and with respect.