In hopes to promote civic interest, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts approved Chapter 296 of the Acts of 2018, An Act to Promote and Enhance Civic Engagement, initiating a statewide implementation of a “Civics Project” where high school students find a way to take action on an element of government they are passionate about.
With a range of ways Massachusetts students can complete this requirement, since 2022 juniors at Newton South High School have been required to complete it as their final project of the school year within their mandated United States history curriculum. For students taking the Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History course, this project commences after the exam in May.
The project entails a research portion, where students look deeper into a range of topics, that leads into an action segment, where students find tangible ways to take steps towards improving their chosen topic.
The topics students choose to focus their actions on have a wide range of opportunities, so long as it pertains to subjective improvement within our current governmental system. For example, south juniors Mia Dror and Hannah Tarmy focused on researching single payer healthcare, arguing that it is something that ought to be implemented more readily throughout our country. Dror said that they chose their topic because they felt it was the root cause of many of the systemic issues within our nation.
“We had so many different issues we wanted to talk about that pertain to America’s corruption, and then we realized a lot of them connected back to health care overall because so many of them, especially like gun control and so many others, were affected by health care access,” she said.
Along with that, Dror said that they felt it was an important matter to research because of the discrepancies they found between the way the COVID-19 pandemic was handled under single-payer healthcare versus the current U.S.’s mixed system.
“60,000 people during one period of COVID, just during [a] study, could have lived if they had been under single payer, so 60,000 people died for absolutely no reason,” she said. To take action, Dror and Tarmy wrote a paper outlining their research and a proposal to mitigate the effects of a mixed payer healthcare system.
Bella Ishanyan is a rising senior at Newton South High School and editor in chief of the Newton South Lion’s Roar.