征求湾区家长意见 -- 关心社区切身利益/高中生爬藤一举两得项目
祝凱-1377 11/19 409395.0/1
Dear Friends:
I have been thinking of a project that may benefit our community in the long run, and I hope some of you may become interested in it.
From my involvement in the anti-SCA5 movement and some election campaigns of this year, I have realized that most Chinese have neither knowledge about nor interest in the political structures and processes of this nation, whether at the local level, the state level, or the federal level.
Many times, a local Measure or state-wide Proposition on the ballots will significantly impact our daily life, but many people simply never heard of it and do not know what to do with it when the election day approaches (assuming they do vote after all -- and that is a big, unsafe assumption). Similarly, when a city council is about to pass an important local law, or when the CA legislature is about to pass SCA-6 (sure, it will come one day), it may be too late for people to do anything about the law or bill, because they never heard of it until the very last moment.
Regardless of those people's political views, this embarrassing situation is simply no good for them.
So I want to launch a Bill (in a broad sense) Analysis / Legislation (in a broad sense) Watchdog project. Basically, we can organize our high school students, under the supervision of a group of lawyers, to actively monitor various proposed bills, analyze them, and timely inform our communities about their analysis results. We will organize the students into groups to do those projects. We can further organize different groups working on the same bill for a debate. For those really excelling, we can let elected officers to give them certificates of awards.
I can see a few good things out of such a project:
(1) The high school students can earn community-service credits.
(2) The students can learn about our society and the real life better, not to mention that they can also improve their team-working, communication, and writing skills.
(3) Every student can add some impressive credentials into his/her college application package. I would imagine an award certificate conferred by Senator Bob Huff is no lesser than a piano competition prize, a math competition prize etc.
(4) The parents can get involved, too -- they will pay more attention to those proposed bills being analyzed by their children. Consequently, they will more likely become registered voters and go to the polling stations on election days.
(5) Last but certainly not least, our community will get timely information about something that can really impact them (more often than not, in a negative way).
I want to gauge your interest, and, more importantly, I want to line up your support. What do you folks think?
祝凯
