The making of good citizens.

• Author: Harris, Don
• Position: Project Citizen

Kids too young to vote are learning about community problems and how to solve them. At the same time, they're learning how the legislature works. So far, 11 states have picked up the program, but sponsors want more involved.

The kids at inner-city Crockett Middle School in Phoenix are street-smart. Most of them are Hispanic. They see, feel and live the rough side of life every day. They are survivors.

So it should come as no surprise that Crockett's eighth graders targeted a Gentlemen's Club, which some years ago would have been called a strip joint, as a class project and community problem under an innovative program: We the People... Project Citizen.

Co-sponsored by the National Conference of State Legislatures and the Center for Civic Education, Project Citizen teaches middle schoolers how to identify and deal with a public policy problem in their community. They gather information, conduct interviews with key players, develop an action plan and encourage elected officials - from school board members to state legislators - to adopt their proposed solutions. With a striptease bar just over 300 feet from their school (within the legal limits, they soon discovered), the Crockett students' problem was drunk drivers so near a school. Their solution: bartenders should be trained to recognize when patrons were drunk and not allow them to get in their cars and drive.

The students met with and interviewed police detectives, school board members, teachers, representatives of a neighborhood association and community professionals in their Project Citizen exercise. More than once employees of the striptease bar hung up on their telephone calls, and calls to government officials often were not returned. But they persevered and put together a portfolio of the problem and their ideas for a solution. They practiced a presentation they would make before a panel of judges at the state Legislature.

One of the judges, Michael Fischer, director of Project Citizen for the Center for Civic Education in Calabasas, Calif., says the program started five years ago with a large-scale pilot operation in California called the American Youth Citizenship Competition. Middle schools were targeted for the program because most high school civics courses concentrate on the federal government. NCSL's Karl Kurtz, another judge in the Arizona competition, says that experience made it clear to him that eighth graders have the "knowledge, energy and enthusiasm necessary to develop innovative public policy solutions to problems in their communities."

Last year, schools in 11 states were involved in Project Citizen. In addition to Arizona, programs ran in Alabama, California, Florida, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. Winning portfolios from statewide competitions across the country will be on display at NCSL's 1997 annual meeting in...