I went to high school last week and found faith.
I hadn’t lost my Lutheran faith, mind you. But I had lost at least a bit of my belief that we should be optimistic about the future.
Mr. Metallo’s AP American government class at Manatee High School restored it.
I had invited myself, prompted by one of his student’s Letter to the Editor. Isadora Calderon had written us about their recent class project.
Just before the presidential election, they had been assigned “to poll members of our community on their constitutional knowledge and political philosophy.”
The goal was to reach 100 people with 10 questions each — five based on their knowledge of the Constitution, five seeking their political opinions. From those, they hoped to make sense of voting patterns, based on gender, age and party affiliation.
The high school pollsters were allowed to choose whom they questioned, but it had to be random. Some chose numbers from the phone book, others went to the mall. Isadora made an interesting choice: the public library.
“I know there’s always people there — and they’re calmer, more likely to want an interview,” she explained.
Some of her classmates conducted their interviews all in “far west” Manatee County.
“They were totally Republican,” Isadora said. “But at the library, well, I knew I’d find more Democrats.”
Isadora crystallized their findings in her letter to the Herald:
We were surprised to find that people of our county are actually quite knowledgeable as to the abilities of each branch of the government and their constitutional rights. It is often said that many people in our country are truly unaware of the specific roles and powers of the government, but we found that of our 5 questions, such as “What branch of the government can levy taxes?” and “Is the burning of the flag protected by the constitution?” members of our community answered 4 (on average) correctly.
Our county is also seen as quite conservative, as six out of seven county commissioners and the majority of our voters are Republican. In our polling, we found this to be generally true in the opinions of those surveyed. About 60% of people agreed that prayer should be allowed in schools, and that same sex marriage should not be legalized.
However this was not the case in the issues of health care and drilling for oil on the coast, both of which hit much closer to home. Those surveyed overwhelmingly disagreed with the idea of drilling off the coast of Florida for oil. They also believed that the government should be responsible for healthcare by a small majority. From our polling we have deduced that the answers to issues which most directly affect those polled contrasted with their answers in regard to other policies.
But these teens also were astonished at what people didn’t know.
“They just weren’t all students of politics, and that they were stumped by any of the questions surprised me,” fellow senior Josh Letts said Friday morning as he guided me across campus to Building 8. “But they sure had some pretty strong opinions.”
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