Mikva Motivates

AP Seminar, AP Government, and AP Economics teacher Daniel Adler is urging his students to participate and enter the Mikva Challenge competition, which is part of a program by Action Civics of Chicago that takes up to 150 students from various states including Illinois, California, and Washington, D.C. and takes them to Iowa. Eligible students will work directly with presidential candidates on their campaign in Iowa.
Schools or classes from around the nation that follow the Mikva curriculum are eligible to participate, making the program more exclusive and privileged for Polytechnic high school students. Students interested in entering the Mikva challenge must write either a 300 word essay between one of two prompts, produce a personal campaign video, or come up with other creative projects that show “Why you want to come on this trip and why we should take YOU.” The due date for submissions is November 30th, and the Iowa trip takes place around the Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, January 15-17th.
“Mikva teaches them how to take an idea and create an action around it. In order to do that, they need to do the research necessary to understand what is going on,” said Adler.
This program has been going on for nearly two decades, and was named after Abner Mikva, a senator from Chicago who wanted to get young children and teenagers into politics. Students are given the opportunity to work with presidential candidates on a door-to-door basis in Iowa as it is more hands-on in contrast to fragmented advertising sprees in other states. Participating students will also be able to attend a summit with other participating students from across the country to discuss youth issues.
Adler plans to influence the AP Seminar class because the course has another project that adheres to the Mikva curriculum: Project Soapbox. Students who take AP Seminar are going to work on a speech competition involving a call to action or a change to a problem that directly affects the student, and proposing ways to fix the problem. Three students from each class are selected to represent Polytechnic high school to pitch their speech to the Long Beach City Council.