EASTHAMPTON — Over the years, a civics class at Easthampton High School has become well-known for the strong community it has fostered and its success in the annual “We the People” competition. The class continued on this path in late January when, for the fourth year in a row, the high school’s team won the program’s state championship.
The nationwide civics program, run by the Center for Civic Education, puts students to the test on their understanding of the U.S. Constitution and legal principles. Easthampton also took home a state win in 2012, and in 2020, won the national competition for the first time.
Students prepare for the competition as part of a class taught by history and government teacher Kelley Brown, with a different group of students participating each year. But just because students can only compete once doesn’t always mean that the end of the class marks the end of their involvement with the competition. Every year, We The People alumni volunteer to mentor students currently taking the class, Brown said, with some continuing to help even six or seven years after graduating.
Brown began preparing teams to compete in 2011, and four years ago, made the program into its own class at Easthampton High School. For some students, the class has an almost mythic quality.
Senior Madeline Moynihan, who is taking the class this year, transferred to Easthampton High School partially so she could enroll in We The People, she said.
“I was really interested in it because of how much of a family it is, and how much people in previous years loved it,” Moynihan said of the class.
Lucia Rea, also a senior, took the class a year ago and came back to mentor current students this year. Rea recalled a similar draw to the course.
“Older siblings will start recruiting younger students and their friends, and it starts becoming this big community and family,” Rea said.
The class is known not only for the close community that it fosters but also for its rigor. Students in the class “learn the ins and outs of the Constitution in its entirety,” Brown said, in both a historical and modern context, and also study case laws. The students are divided into six units, each of which are assigned specific topics, and become experts on their particular areas.
In class and at the competition, students “testify as a panel of experts” in a simulated congressional hearing, Brown said, and prepare statements to a series of prompts to present before judges. The students testify as individual units on topics such as separation of powers, civil disobedience, privacy rights, and voting rights and disenfranchisement, then are scored as a team.
The team competed against five other schools at the state championship, including neighboring Williston Northampton School in Easthampton, which took second place.
Remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic has limited some of the class interactions that help to build the course’s well-known sense of community. During a typical year with an in-person state championship, Easthampton students are also accompanied by an “absurd amount of community members who come with us,” said senior Alice Wanamaker, who participated in the class last year as a student and this year as a mentor.
For Wanamaker, volunteering as a mentor felt all the more important during the pandemic. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down in-person learning last March, when Wanamaker was preparing to compete in nationals, the class was a “lifeline throughout the spring,” and one of the few academic experiences that felt the same even over Zoom.
“I felt like I couldn’t afford to lose that community and lose that experience going into senior year,” Wanamaker said. “So few of the things I was excited about had actually happened … It feels the same, and it’s even more rewarding to help a new group of people do it than it was to compete myself.”
Rea agreed with this assessment.
“We the People is one of the things that stayed constant no matter what,” she said.
And while students taking the class this year didn’t have quite the same experience at the virtual competition, they still bonded during this year’s course and look to We the People as a light among many of the ongoing hardships posed by the pandemic.
“I just love the family connection of it,” Moynihan said of her experience with the class this year. “I loved having mentors the entire year. It was so much fun to get together after school.”
Brown acknowledged that this year’s group — which consists of 12 students, compared to the usual class size of around 20 — has faced “challenges that no other class has really faced, yet they rose to the occasion.”
The students “missed out on a lot of the extrinsic rewards, but clearly bought into a lot of the intrinsic rewards of the program,” Brown said, “like learning and being able to support each other.”
It’s not uncommon for the class to even influence career choices, according to students. Rea and Moynihan said that We the People inspired them to major in political science, while Wanamker, who has wanted to be a politician since she was 4 years old, said that the class affirmed her career aspirations.
In addition to the community fostered among the class, businesses, state and local officials and the city itself also play a large role in supporting the team, Brown said.
Wanamaker noted a similar phenomenon.
“This is the only class where I feel like my entire town is as invested in how I’m doing in this class as I am,” she said.
The students are now preparing for the national competition, which typically sees around 55 schools from throughout the country participate. Prior to Easthampton’s win last year, no school from Massachusetts had made the top 10 at the national level. The national We the People competition will be held virtually from April 24-26.
Jacquelyn Voghel can be reached at jvoghel@gazettenet.com.