Thursday, November 06, 2008
Obama is at center of classes at William Fleming HS on day after elections
Students reflected on the historic election and the Democrat's next moves.
Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times
Edward Day, a senior at William Fleming High School in Roanoke, listens in government class Wednesday, a day after the historic presidential election that was won by Barack Obama. Day, who voted for the first time, said he hopes the president-elect shifts power away from the upper class.
Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times
At William Fleming, Catherine Keith (back right) discusses with her class the election of the first black United States president.
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Barack Obama had been president-elect for all of 12 hours, but William Fleming High School in Roanoke was not about to cut him any slack.
"What would be one thing that you would like to see President Obama change?" asked Catherine Keith, the teacher of this 12th-grade government class.
Edward Day, who voted for the first time Tuesday, said he didn't like "seeing the upper class having all the power."
"I'd like to see the homeless rates go down," Terry Plank said.
"I'd like to see him bring our troops home," put in Jameka Hodnett.
If these roughly 20 students are remotely representative of the country as a whole, Obama had better get busy. Keith's class is watching.
Young voters got an extraordinary amount of attention this year. And on Wednesday, the objects of all that attention, it seemed, needed time to reflect on what had just happened.
"I remember I heard a lot about Barack Obama when he first started," Day said. "His campaign was kind of small."
Day watched as the Democrat's poll numbers yo-yoed during the course of the campaign. Now, he said, he's already expecting the president-elect to run for a second term.
So what did Day think of voting?
"It wasn't that complicated, but it was kind of exciting," he said. "It was big for me because it was such a big election."
Some of his classmates, however, who are still too young to vote, said they were upset to have missed out. Fortunately for them, Virginia holds elections at least once a year, so they won't have to wait a long time after they turn 18 to cast a ballot.
Keith said she carved out some time from her regular curriculum this year to talk about the campaign. Her class has learned about the Electoral College, discussed political advertising and kept up with developments through the newspaper. Her classroom is covered with cutouts of the candidates. She wore red, white and blue beads around her neck.
Keith has not had much help from classroom materials. She uses a handout from the 1968 race to explain the Electoral College. The school's dated textbook closes with Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election.
"We will be adopting, I'm hoping, our new book," she said.
Later on Wednesday, it was City School's turn to talk about the election. City School, an advanced program in English and government, has about 80 students, many of whom live in Roanoke's more affluent neighborhoods.
"I've often had a much larger population of Republicans than I have had of Democrats," said Ginger Eure, the program's director.
That was not the case this year. A mock election revealed 50 Obama supporters and 15 for Republican John McCain. Mark Warner, a Democrat, also won his U.S. Senate race by a wide margin. But incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke County, still enjoyed the support of City School.
Before class started Wednesday, Eure spent about 15 minutes asking the students for their thoughts on Election Day.
Several students talked about their work as poll observers or volunteers for the Obama campaign. One mentioned looking at voter rolls to find out how many people listed as Democratic supporters had not voted.
"And everybody who hadn't voted would be called and picked up and taken to vote," she said.
"They did a lot of curbside voting," another student said.
"There were a ton of young people in our polling place," another said.
