A few weeks ago, Poly hosted a Civics Workshop, which consisted of 45-minute sessions led by a collaborative team comprised of both History Department faculty and Civic Service Learning Team (SLT) student members during an Upper School assembly block. Through a variety of topics, the session aimed to expand student understanding of issues such as civic engagement, moderating discussion around politics, and general understanding of structures such as the electoral college. However, I believe Poly should’ve spent more time finding ways to address the candidate’s policies in an educational, non-biased way.

In Chapel, before the workshops, Head of Upper School Sarah Bates recounted her own experience voting in the 2000 election, as well as her goal for Poly to remain a grounded, safe space for students during and after the 2024 election. As a member of this year’s Service Learning Team, I co-led a discussion centered around civic engagement beyond voting. We had a small icebreaker, and the next 40 minutes was a compilation of reading from slides, playing videos, and clinically awkward waits for someone, anyone to raise their hand with something to share. When my fellow co-leaders resorted to calling on people to speak from what they learned, answers were often hesitant, surface-level, and short. If we were lucky, we heard a quoted statistic from the YouTube video or a paraphrased line from the previous slide. The sessions were short, lecture-based and it did not feel like a truly open space for sharing. A friend afterward confirmed my thoughts and described the session as “disengaging.” Although this was the only workshop I personally experienced, after asking around I realized the sentiment of disengagement seemed to be felt to some degree, at least among students who also had a hand in leading discussions. 

Eleventh grader and SLT member Talia Barro-Parsoff says that it was unclear whether or not the workshop was successful. “We didn’t get anywhere with the students,” she noted, “The participants either didn’t feel engaged, or we didn’t do a good job bringing up topics that interested them.” Attending the Civic SLT twice a week in accordance with my service requirement brought a backstage glimpse into the creation of these lessons, from a sneak peek into Mr. Sivin’s lesson plan, to scrolling through the slide shows of at least three other student-led presentations prepared by the Civics SLT group. These presentations, although thorough, well-made, and comprehensive, were very similar in their layout and in how they aimed to relay information to the audience. Everyone had a clip of a video, some laid-out discussion questions, and maybe a minor activity at the end. There was even a case in which two groups accidentally picked the exact same icebreaker. There is a very real possibility that although the topics of discussion changed depending on which session you attended, one could receive a similar style of education no matter what topic you were assigned. Even within this style of presentation, the topics were often too broad to truly educate about this election. My own topic, Civic Engagement Beyond Voting, completely avoided talk of the election in its specifics entirely. The How to Talk (and not Fight) About Politics workshop also avoided direct mention of the election, preferring instead to discuss the broader concept of perspective, with the help of a children’s book. 

Caroline Nemeth, a ninth-grade participant in a different workshop, explained how she didn’t consider her program to really educate her on the election, saying that she felt it focused on “mainstream knowledge.” Poly’s preference to steer completely clear of divisive political topics may not be a crime, but if it was, it is not victimless. Lila Daniels ’26 (the Polygon’s Managing Editor) published a piece to the Polygon that included a poll of 60 Upper School students, and according to the numbers “87.9 percent of the students voted between 1 and 3 on a 1-10 scale of whether Poly has done a sufficient job educating students about this year’s presidential candidates, 1 being ‘No, not at all’ and 10 being ‘Yes, I have a good understanding on both candidates.’” The article references the poll once more to describe how “82.4 percent of the students voted between 1 and 4 on a 1-10 scale for the question, ‘Do you think Poly has done a sufficient job educating students about the election process in general?’ (1 being ‘No, I have no knowledge about the election process,’and 10 being ‘Yes, I feel very confident with the election process.’).” Even though the results among Upper School students suggested a lack of clarity on Poly’s part to provide enough information, the institution is far from alone in their hesitation to approach the topic. According to a survey by the EdWeek Research Center, 58% of K-12 teachers said they did not plan to talk about the election, 22% out of concern for parents’ complaints, and 19% because of a lack of faith in the students’ ability to “discuss this topic with one another in a respectful manner.” Despite the risks, by avoiding discussion of the names, the details and the policies, and the relevance of the election, Poly has hindered or perhaps eliminated its effectiveness in developing an Upper School that feels sufficiently educated about the 2024 election. 

I feel that maybe the task of providing a more engaging approach to educating students on this year’s election was misunderstood entirely by Poly. To others, however, that is not the case. Some feel that the daunting task of discussing and teaching about the election is a precarious path that may not even be Poly’s responsibility. “It’s a hard line to walk. Someone is always going to be upset,” said Phoebe Aberlin-Ruiz, a Middle and Upper School Health Teacher. In spite of Poly’s unwillingness to discuss aspects of the election that prove conflicting for many, it is also vital to recognize that doing just that could result in dividing the student community or their parents. Beyond maintaining strict neutrality to avoid offending parents, the consequences of developing such topics could split the student body, force people to take sides and spark the clash of conflicting viewpoints that can do more harm than good. Aberlin feels the 2024 election had felt far more divisive on campus and within the community than the 2020 or 2016 presidential races. Should Poly have risked deepening this division in attempts to contextualize the events of the upcoming election? No matter how much I and others wish to foster healthy discussions around the topic, the answer may be no. “How do you try to respect everyone’s viewpoints and feelings, but also make people feel as though we are addressing the topic? There might not be an answer for that,” Aberlin said. Perhaps the answer can’t be found locally, and Poly, if they hope to handle elections in an educational yet sensitive manner, must learn to look outside of our campus, and peer into the mind of administrators beyond our own. By observing other institutions, I believe it is possible to find a happy medium for both arguments behind Poly’s perspective on the election. 

Some schools across the country approached the 2024 election differently than Poly. In the Crosstown High School of Memphis, Tennessee, A.P. U.S. government students underwent a semester-long, hands-on fictional election that each student played a role in. They simultaneously tracked the actual presidential race and put under a microscope all the debates and events that surround it. These students, active in their work to increase their own understanding, feel as if they can “see parallels” to the real world, according to the Chalkbeat article chronicling their experience. There is a clear difference between a lengthy course dedicated to preparing students for the election through engagement with their personal beliefs and real material, and doing what we at Poly did, which was setting up a short, rehearsed session to educate on issues tied to civics that members of the Civics SLT deemed relevant. 

In the Murrell Dobbins Career and Technical Education High School school located in Philadelphia, students examined the political spectrum and engaged in an activity that allowed them to assess where they stood on certain issues on this spectrum. The students then engaged in the opposite of what I observed at Poly — an engaging, thoughtful, healthy discussion that, despite the fears, held no mention of strife or divisive conflict beyond a minor degree. By doing so, Murrell Dobbins is disproving what schools across the country, including Poly, may be fearful of: that schools cannot engage in direct political discussion topics and candidates without it somehow resulting in arguments or drawing outside complaints. 

Poly is coming to accept this, slowly yet surely, taking steps in this direction that I am personally quite proud of. As part of election programming this year, Poly solicited questions from the student body about the election and is having faculty answer one each assembly. The day I am writing this, in fact, Poly took the time during the assembly block to answer a question about what the conservative political initiative Project 2025 was and its implications. Head of History Department Virginia Dillon delivered the presentation and took care to convey core details with as little bias as possible, oftentimes referencing Project 2025’s self-described purpose, trusted news sources, or plain facts to present an image as true to actuality as possible. Furthermore, she encouraged students to do their own research on this topic and beyond, so as to increase their overall understanding and develop a well-educated and personal opinion on the issue. The assembly was the first time in my rather young experience of Poly Upper School that I felt the school had explicitly addressed such a controversial, direct topic with the student body. 

Although we have not yet progressed to fostering fully open conversations about sensitive topics such as Project 2025, which I believe will encourage growth in students’ perspectives on the election, it is certainly a positive movement forward. Ultimately, I wish for Poly to find a way to discuss the election more specifically while still avoiding bias or conflict. I do not believe that growth will come through their current programming. Poly has an intelligent, stellar student body ready and willing to have difficult, controversial discussions with each other beyond being lectured with vaguely political slideshows. The next time elections circle about, it should be a top priority for the school to keep these goals in mind. Luckily for everyone, I will still be here to write on this subject in my senior and election year of 2028 (yay!).