School’s Out Tomorrow
So Student Ambassadors Are Powering Up at Polling Places with the Committee of Seventy. What’s That About?
By Elena Tomlinson
At Mastery Lenfest school, Joe Bradley designs curriculum with a clear goal: register students to vote and get them to the polls. For Bradley, Government and Economics Content Lead, holding students accountable means making voter registration a graded homework assignment — and encouraging other Mastery Lenfest teachers to do the same. He also teams up with a venerable Philly nonprofit to wake his students up to the power they have, and how to wield it.
Ultimately, Bradley says, his students are free to choose whether or not he turns in their voter registration form when they turn 18. Some choose not to register, most commonly for religious or citizenship reasons. But for the majority who allow Bradley to turn in their voter registration, all he can hope is that they show up to the polls. “As much as I push it,” Bradley explains, “if it’s raining, then they might not go out and vote.” Tomorrow’s predicted rain may put Bradley’s efforts to the test!
But Bradley works in optimism, and he is not alone. At the Mastery schools, the past few years have seen great increases in parent and faculty participation toward this mission.
Weekly meetings among Government and Economics faculty address voting registration more and more each year, and Mastery Votes, a campaign headed by the school’s PTA, aims to get 8,000 pledges to vote from its parents, students, and staff. Mastery Votes provides a rationale for the mission: “When we don’t vote,” their campaign reads, “common sense gun legislation doesn’t pass! Our schools don’t get the funding and support they need!” and “Our communities are ignored and suffer from not using our power!”
For three of the past four years, the Mastery schools have also teamed up with the Committee of Seventy, a non-profit, non-partisan organization, started in 1904, according to its website: “To keep watch and ward over the public interests” of Philadelphians.
This fall, the Committee’s Policy Program Manager, Patrick Christmas, visited Mastery Lenfest to talk to students about the breakdown of voter turnout by age, race, gender, and income level. According to Christmas, “The most striking realization among many students is the loss of power they suffer because of low turnout. We look at the numbers for the country and for Philly, then some of the issues that impact them on a daily basis. They understand a lot of this stuff intuitively but need more opportunities to get directly engaged.”
Students were sufficiently moved by Christmas’s visit and by the Committee’s vision — for a “City and Commonwealth with a vibrant local democracy and trustworthy government,” — that 18 Mastery Lenfest students signed up to volunteer on election day through the Committee’s Election Ambassador program. Philadelphia public schools will be closed on election day, so these Student Election Ambassadors will show up to polls across Philadelphia to do more than just vote; the students will administer brief exit surveys to voters and will be available to answer questions about the voting process, if they come up. “On Election Day, a minor question can grow into a serious problem absent the right information,” Christmas explains. “Ambassadors are armed with a comprehensive handbook to address these sorts of issues.”
For Joe Bradley and his students, the Committee has indeed achieved its purpose to give “voice to higher expectations for the behavior and performance of public officials and for how government should operate. And Bradley is correct to connect his Class of 2019 public school students with Christmas and the hundred-plus-year-old Committee of Seventy. In this teamwork is democracy’s beautiful connection among groups of citizens who all stand to benefit from free and fair elections and good government.
Click here to use the Committee of Seventy’s 2018 Voting Guide.
Elena Tomlinson is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania studying Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Her greatest passion is empowering younger students with technical skills and confidence. She organizes Tech it Out Philly, a free program that teaches Philadelphia high schoolers web development and social activism.
