As voters pulled into the school district office parking lot to cast their ballots on Election Day, a Village School teacher stalked across the crowded lot to ask four girls why they were questioning voters just outside a polling station.
Clutching clipboards and manila envelopes, the South students began to explain their presence. Carl Cooper, the district’s Social Studies supervisor, soon swooped in to allay the teacher’s concerns, which she said were due to the “very sensitive” nature of this year’s election.
The four students are seniors taking AP Comparative Government & Politics, and alongside six other classmates they had been in the parking lot since 8:30 a.m. asking voters to fill out exit poll surveys. They are part of an election day field trip in which students went to every West Windsor voting station to collect data.
“It’s all about engagement,” said South social studies teacher Mike Garzio, who alongside social studies teacher Erin Schomburg organized the class project. “Statistics show when students are exposed to elections at a younger age, they become more involved civic citizens later on.”
Aside from the inquiry from the concerned teacher and dodging cars in the crowded lot, the students reported pleasant interactions from responsive voters and excitement over seeing “democracy in action.”
“I expected people to be stand-offish, but everyone generally has been very nice,” said Virginia Jiang, who cast her first vote at a different polling station in town during her lunch break.
It helps that there are some familiar faces, with former classmates and their parents emerging from the woodworks to vote.
“A lot of people say people don’t vote, they don’t care,” said Amrita Suresh. “I don’t think that’s true at all.”
Keely Lyons said he enjoyed chatting with an older voter who first cast a ballot in the 1960 presidential election, as well as meeting a WW-P alum who graduated in 1976.
“It’s cool to see what people care about. They are very interested in the issues,” Lyons said.
Suresh also expressed surprise at how many voters checked off every listed issue in the survey as “highly important.”
“Regardless of partisanship, many voters really cared about every issue,” Suresh said. “It’s not just one or two issues that people care about, which is how it is often talked about.”
This is the second year South’s AP Government teachers have organized an election day field trip to West Windsor’s voting stations.
Garzio grew up in Hamilton and now lives in West Windsor with his wife and two-year-old twins. His father was a union worker at the former Ewing General Motors plant and his mother still works in HR for the state judiciary. A Steinert graduate, Garzio went to college in Charleston, South Carolina, and later attained a masters from Holy Family University. Garzio joined the district in 2007 and began teaching AP Government in 2010.
Last year, students surveyed 648 voters in West Windsor’s 13 voting stations. Question categories include age, ethnicity, education level, party association, and whether they had kids in the district. Voters also were asked who they voted for in the town council and general assembly races. The exit polls stayed out of the West Windsor school board race, which included their classmate, Jordon DeGroote. (He was also enrolled in the class, but did not participate in the project.)
This year’s survey only asked for voter’s age, ethnicity, and education level, while also asking voters to identify which national and local issues they consider to be “highly important,” as well as assessments on third parties and the economic situation the past eight years.
Students collected 1,250 surveys this year. Some 60 percent of respondents rated the economic situation in the past eight years as “improved.” Feelings about third-party presidential candidates were split: one-third felt third parties are spoilers, another third considered them important and the others had no opinion.
And the most important local issue? Education.
“The students want to ask who people voted for, but we can find that out anyway from Mercer County data,” Garzio said. “This year we are asking how the voters feel and which issues they care about. We’re trying to move away from the horserace element, trying to make it more telling of the community.”
The day after the election, Garzio found himself in the unexpected position of guiding a discussion on president-elect Donald Trump.
“It was more of a discussion of what the first two years of a unified district would look like. As a comparative point, Obama had a unified Congress his first two years,” Garzio said. “As a civics teacher, you have to be everything and nothing in terms of ideology. You put things in perspective. FDR interned Japanese-Americans. Truman dropped atomic bombs. There is no perfect president. The goal of the civics classroom is to make sure to students understand what the role of a citizen is and how to interact with our democratic system.”
What was the student response?
“I think the perception, in a heavily Democratic area, it’s not so much the sky is falling but some of the kids were feeling negative coming in,” Garzio said. “It’s my job as a civics teacher to say, ‘Hey, America is a republic and it’s the way it is.’ There are reasons why the midwest states voted for Trump. And there’s always going to be roughly half of the population that doesn’t like the results.”
