LCHS students get in-depth look at government

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) - High School football regionals are Friday night, and the WISH-TV sports team will be covering eight games – including our Zone Game of the Week at Lawrence Central High School. The Bears take on the Red Devils of Pike High School.

Each week the 24-Hour News 8 Daybreak team highlights off-the-field news at the host school of The Zone Tailgate. This week, the focus is on a government and law class at Lawrence Central preparing for a big competition.

On Monday, six groups of Lawrence Central students will compete on their knowledge of Constitutional Law - namely, philosophical foundations of our constitutional system, structures of government, expression and due process rights, and equal protection in voting - against students from other local schools.

The competition is structured like a Congressional hearing where senators lob questions to experts about a certain topic. In this competition, the “senators” are the judges, while the “experts” are the students.

The judges ask a question centering around one of these topics of Constitutional Law. Each of the three students reads a portion of the prepared statement, which takes four minutes. Then, the judges have eight minutes to ask the students whatever they want dealing with the issue. The students are graded and scored based on how they respond to those questions.

"Each U.S. congressional district has what's called the district level competition," said government and law teacher and We the People academic coach Drew Horvath. “The winner of the district-level competition will then compete against the other district winners for a state championship. If they win, they go to nationals."

Horvath said his team has won district nearly every year since 1994, and has won the state competition four times - in 1995, 1997, 2001 and 2003. In the four times the Lawrence Central team has gone to the national competition, they’ve finished as high as fifth place.

"The point is for the students to demonstrate that they understand the issues well enough that, in fact, they can articulate the arguments from a variety of different perspectives," Horvath said.

The competition was born out of a curriculum created by The Center for Civic Education . The curriculum, called We the People, has an accompanying text book which promotes civic competence and responsibility.

"Basically, throughout this class, we've learned a lot about how our government has become the way it is and how what things happened in the past and what discussions different groups had to get us to where we are today,” said Lawrence Central senior Molly Liss.

The material has been compelling enough to make another school senior, Ashley Spees, consider changing her career.

"Honestly, I'm debating right now whether I want to be a lawyer because of this class. I've always wanted to be pre-med, but it's like I don’t know now what I want to do,” she said.

For more information on the We The People program, click here .