Seth hall for congress issued the following announcement on Oct 16.
RACELAND Members of three student service clubs at Raceland-Worthington High School have joined forces in a year-long project with long-term implications for their school, their community and their country.
The Spanish Honorary Society, the Key Club and the Beta Club are spreading the word wherever they go that the decennial U.S. Census is coming up in 2020, and an accurate count is vital in determining the number of seats each state has in the U.S. House of Representatives. They want to motivate as many people as possible to participate when census workers come calling, or to go online to be counted.
The census, a head count of every person living in the United States and its territories, also is used to determine funding for highways, hospitals, schools and other community services.
Club members will help by fanning out in the community and getting the word out at sporting events, school gatherings, and in the course of performing other service projects.
“We are all out in the community a lot, and we all are involved in a lot, and we all play different sports,” said sophomore Kayla Coffee. Coffee, junior Ragan Adkins and senior Macen Witt are spearheading the drive.
The three are members of all three student groups.
“We as clubs focus on volunteering so we can talk to people at volunteer events like at the Community Kitchen and Hope’s Place, and ringing bells for Salvation Army,” Adkins said.
Athletic events will provide fertile ground, they believe. They are eyeing an upcoming tournament at Greenup as a venue to get the word out to people in multiple communities — players, fans, families and friends. “We can use it as a platform to get the message out about the importance of being counted,” Witt said.
Their Spanish teacher, Zenaida Smith, initiated the campaign following a Raceland city council meeting at which she learned the sparsely staffed census office needed local partners.
She volunteered the clubs, for all of which she serves as faculty sponsor. Club members bought into the idea immediately, Witt, Adkins and Coffee all said.
The main thrust of the campaign is to maximize their community’s participation, but as members of the Spanish Club, they also recognize the challenge of counting the Hispanic and Latino populations. “It ties into the Spanish Honorary Society because we learn a lot about diversity and we know it’s important that the Hispanic population gets counted,” Adkins said.
A significant percentage of Latinos are leery of the census, fearing participation will make them vulnerable to immigration enforcement.
To that demographic, they want to point out that census information is strictly confidential and cannot be used in court or by any government agency, even law enforcement.
The campaign has served as an ongoing civics lesson, bringing an understanding of its scope and purpose to highschoolers who previously knew little about it.
“I didn’t know much about the census before this. I had no idea how much it affected funding for things like jobs and transportation and schools and medical care,” Coffee said.
The three clubs have about 250 members — most of the student body at Raceland, and maybe a third of them will keep the campaign’s momentum going until April 1, the day of the census, the three student leaders said.
Original source here.
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