Oklahoma teenagers want their voices heard to make the world ‘a better place’

Oklahoma Engaged reporters and Generation Citizen teamed up to figure out how students felt about election issues

• Robby Korth
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Robby Korth covers education for StateImpact Oklahoma. He grew up in Ardmore, Oklahoma and Fayetteville, Arkansas and is a graduate of the University of Nebraska. Before working at StateImpact, he covered higher education for The Roanoke Times newspaper in Virginia.
• Kateleigh Mills
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Kateleigh Mills returned to KOSU in December 2019 as Special Projects Reporter, following a year-long stint at KWBU in Waco, Texas. Previously, Mills was a news assistant and All Things Considered host for KOSU from March to December 2018. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Central Oklahoma in December 2017. While studying journalism and professional media, she worked with the UCO’s journalism staff to reinvent the campus newspaper for a more multimedia purpose – joining with the campus radio and television stations for news updates and hosting public forums with campus groups. The Edmond-raised reporter was editor-in- chief of her college newspaper when it won the Society of Professional Journalism award for Best Newspaper in Category B. Mills also received the Oklahoma Press Association Award for ‘Outstanding Promise in Journalism’ at the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame event in 2017. She is also the Oklahoma Collegiate Media Association's recipient for 'College Newspaper Journalist of the Year' in 2017.

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Presenters address students during a session hosted by Generation Citizen and Oklahoma Engaged. In the leadup to the 2020 election, the organizations came together to ask young people from across the state how they felt about political issues.

Most Oklahoma high schoolers can’t vote and that isn’t lost on them.

But, they all want to have a bigger influence on the 2020 election, which they feel will have an outsized influence on their future.

So in a series of Zoom focus groups last week, StateImpact and Generation Citizen asked Oklahoma high school students for a discussion about how they are consuming and using information about each candidate’s campaign and platform.

In three, one-hour sessions moderators asked students how they felt about presidential candidates stances on an array of topics. The dozen or so students responded by filling out polling data and having brief discussions.

You can hear highlights of the conversations moderated by StateImpact’s Robby Korth, Generation Citizen’s Elizabeth Sidler and KOSU’s Kateleigh Mills below.

How did the students actually vote?

This being 2020, there were a few technology issues with a couple of the civics students voting in Duncan. So the numbers aren’t entirely consistent. But you can take the quiz they did below and see how your thoughts compare to those of the teenage panelists from Oklahoma City, Duncan, Coweta, Stilwell, Pawnee and Alva.

This COVID-19/education reporting is made possible through a grant from the Walton Family Foundation. 

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Question 6.