With election day quickly approaching, people across the country are preparing for a new president. Among these are millions of new voters who are still in high school.
Currently 31 states require high school students to take at least one semester-long government class. College Board also offers an AP U.S. Government class to students around the world.
At WHS the AP Government class is taught by Kyle Stapleton (staff). “I always tell my students I have two main goals. One, for you to understand your rights and responsibilities as a citizen. The second one is the importance of being involved,” Stapleton said. “Democracy is not a spectator sport. You have to be active and engaged and pay attention. I also try to let them know that they actually have a lot of political power if they choose to wield it.”
Classes like these give students opportunities to learn and have mature conversations about the U.S. government. Teachers get to support these students by “just having the conversation,” Stapleton said. “People can have a good, mature conversation …. I think that’s what the teachers can do, to listen and have the students listen.”
Many students share this opinion on being able to have quality conversations. “I mean Stapleton, Weiser … Bator, Thompson even, some really smart guys, you know, it’s cool to be able to have the pleasure to talk with them,” Adam Kirkpatrick (12), an AP Government student, said.
Many tools exist to help new voters. In Colorado people can register to vote when they are 16. College Board gives a pop-up to anyone in Colorado to register to vote as soon as they turn 16.
Other informative tools exist such as “what they call a blue book. What that does is it gives you a pretty good overview of the text of the initiatives and the amendment options that are on the ballot,” Stapleton said. “There’s a group called the League of Women Voters. They always put out voting guides … and then obviously they can get on a good, reputable actual news source like the Colorado sun, which gives kind of a good overview of them as well.”
Social media and news sites are another big tool for many young people.
“I think the way the algorithms work can affect the way I see things based on what they’re showing me. Which kind of sucks because I don’t get to just see what’s actually happening because sometimes it’ll skew it one way or another,” Blake McComack (12) warns. McComack is another AP Government student and gets to vote for the first time this year because he is now 18 years old.
In other cases the tools can be very useful. “Lately (I) have been trying to look at more European news even, like other countries looking at us, outside in,” Kirkpatrick said. “It’s definitely interesting to contextualize where we are within the global scale, you know, because really, we’re not doing too bad.”
In Colorado, the deadline to vote in-person is 7 p.m. on Election Day, which is Tuesday, Nov. 5.
