Civic engagement:
Civic engagement can be a confusing topic, especially for the younger community. Freshman world history teacher Richard Shrock explains it as having an interest and impact on your community through involvement and getting information.
“Whether that’s your small community, like here at Sion, or your bigger community, your neighborhood, city, all of Kansas City, all the way up to a bigger, broader community,” Shrock said. “You should think about yourself as part of all of those and be thinking, ‘How do I engage with that community?’”
How do we engage in our community? Some ways could include volunteering at local nonprofit organizations, after school programs to learn more than just the background knowledge of politics, and having conversations with others about their views.
“Civic engagement is how people participate in their community,” AP U.S. History teacher Chris Schreiber said. “Whether that’s through volunteer work, running for office, or organizing for non political causes. But it can also be outside the realm of purely governmental. It can be anything you’re doing to contribute to the community that you live in.”
For Shrock, one of his biggest acts of civic engagement is contributing his time and energy to Sion. He teaches our community and participates in the school’s events year-round.
“I devote a ton of time, energy and feelings into this place. I think about things that help us here. I think about what our struggles and challenges are, and that’s pretty easy, right?” Shrock said. “Because I’m here every day. I’m confronted by people that I care about and I see what their struggles are and I want them to be happy”
Large-scale civic engagement is more difficult, especially if you aren’t around the larger community or actively a part of it.
“It’s easier to hide from those struggles of the larger community,” Shrock said. “I don’t have to see that every day and I should probably pay more attention to those things.”
There are more ways to participate in civic engagement and help the community. Schreiber volunteers with his mother at Harvesters as a form of civic engagement along with teaching.
“I think there’s a lot of things you can do,” Schreiber said. “Whatever you’re passionate about there’s groups of people who are also passionate about that. Find that group of people, work with them, and learn from them. That is a great way to get started.”
Sophomore Layla Love also believes that it is important to participate in civic engagement, especially when it comes to local engagement. For example, she thinks that it’s good to get to know the smaller community around us like our neighborhood. And that can really just mean getting to know and helping your neighbors.
“I think civic engagement is important because it makes you get to know people in your neighborhood, because everybody has a different story, and everybody does things differently,” said Love.
Voting:
40 to 70 percent of people in the United States do not vote,whether it be for the community’s polls or for the Nation’s polls.
”I think it’s important to vote because it’s the bare minimum that you can do to try to change the environment around you, to push for things that you care about. It’s not very hard. We’ve made it easier and easier to register to vote. I could vote today. I could leave work and go to the polling place in Kansas and vote. If I’m busy on November 5, on election day, that’s okay. I could take care of it. Now. I could go on this Saturday at 10 o’clock in the morning. So we’ve made it easy. There’s no reason not to vote,” Freshman world history teacher Richard Shrock said “But I think even though it’s super easy to do it, you have to think about a lot of things. You have to think about what your interests are, what kind of vote is going to help you and your community. And that’s not simple. The nature of your community is complex. To use your vote to advocate for something you care about means educating yourself about what the right decision is. So on the one hand, it’s not very hard, but it is pretty hard to do well. And in the modern era, I think it’s difficult to get information that helps you decide what’s the best thing to do with the environment.”
Schrieber believes that the low voting turnouts could be because of many things.
“I think it’s some people who are maybe turned off by politics in general, right? I know when we talk about it in class there’s some people who just don’t want to talk about it, they don’t want to engage in it for a variety of reasons.” AP U.S. History teacher Chris Schreiber said. “And so people just aren’t active politically for whatever reason.”
Our country’s large population can lead to people believing their vote doesn’t matter. Our system of voting and the electoral college can compound this, making it seem even less important for one person to vote.
The amount of young adults voting is even smaller for a lot of these reasons, one of the big ones being not being educated enough to feel capable or feel the need or want to vote. Shrock spoke about some ways he believes could help people to gain their views and opinions and be educated on who or what to vote for.
“A better approach for all voters is to think about the political issues in your community, figure out what those are, and try to vote in elections on a local standpoint,” Shrock said. “You can do that by talking to the local city council member running for city council in your district about their beliefs. That personal connection on a local level would help you understand the issues better. You can call their opponent and talk to them. You have easier access to information on the local and that’s a great place to start. And I think starting to understand those local issues better can translate into thinking about larger national politics issues.”