How to Increase High School Voter Engagement in Pennsylvania
By Collin Wang
As an important battleground state, Pennsylvania holds a pivotal role in United States elections. In the past four presidential elections, the candidate who collected Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes prevailed, becoming the nation’s next president. For a state whose electoral votes are so important, its voter registration, especially among the youth, surprisingly lags behind. The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University reported that in November 2022, there were 3% fewer registrations among 18 to 19-year-olds in Pennsylvania, compared to November 2018. The Civics Center notes, in January 2022, that in the state’s two largest school districts (the School District of Philadelphia [SDP] and the Pittsburgh Public School District [PPS]) only 15.2% and 14.5% of eligible students were registered to vote respectively.
As a rising high school senior living in suburban Pittsburgh, I’ve seen firsthand how critical it is to increase these abysmal numbers. Through two voting drives at my own school, I registered hundreds of students. I found that many didn’t know or didn’t care about the voter registration process. Additionally, as a New Voters Policy Intern and New Voters Research Network Research Assistant, a large portion of my work centers around Pennsylvania as it is one of New Voters’ five focus states. Thus, increasing youth civic engagement throughout Pennsylvania is one of my top priorities.
Recently, I completed one of my research network tasks, a case study on the civic engagement resources available at 190 Philadelphia and Pittsburgh high schools. I found potential problems and shortcomings of the current voter registration efforts of these schools. Here are a few of my takeaways and suggestions on how we can increase high school voter engagement in Pennsylvania:
Require schools to collaborate with voting nonprofits. In our systematic review of the schools, we found that only 18% partnered with voting nonprofits (Rock the Vote, PA Youth Vote, Committee of Seventy, etc). Many schools are missing out on the several potential benefits of partnering with these organizations. Two benefits include:
Schools may receive access to more voting resources to share with their students.
Organizations can facilitate a school’s voter registration drive.
We also found that SDP has a partnership with PA Youth Vote. However, individual schools in the district are not required to engage in the partnership. This explains why only 18% of schools work with voting nonprofits. PA Youth Vote is currently advocating for the SDP school board to pass a policy requiring every school in the district to engage with them. Schools across the state must start nonprofit partnerships and pass this policy to enforce engagement with them.
Pay teachers to serve as staff sponsors of voting drives. Only 16% of 190 schools had a specified staff contact for their voting program. Staff can play an integral role in registering students to vote by starting voting drives, promoting voting in their classes, and serving as resources for students. SDP already has a program that allows teachers to apply for a “Voter Champion” position to earn extra compensation, but not every school takes advantage of this opportunity. If we could make their program mandatory and expand it to school districts across Pennsylvania through a bill similar to our own HB 2699, we could expand voter registration initiatives and register more voters.
Civically engage parents. One interesting finding was that only 7% of schools specifically stated that they had made efforts to engage parents civically. Involving parents in their children’s civic engagement process could have a positive influence on the students. Students may be more inclined to register if they have parents who advocate for voting causes.
For now, these solutions are just suggestions. Most of them will require more research in the future to prove their effectiveness. Regardless, there are clearly several problems with the current state of youth civic engagement in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. It is imperative to swiftly find solutions to solve them in the cities and beyond.
