By MICHAEL NUNES
Staff Writer
JAMESBURG — Away from the twists and turns of the 2016 presidential campaign trail, the C-SPAN Bus stopped at Grace M. Breckwedel (GMB) Middle School in Jamesburg to give students a lesson in civics.
“This is great. We’ve been doing a lot of the campaign coverage for the primaries so this is a nice chance to visit with the students,” said La’Shawna Saint-Preux, a marketing representative for C-SPAN who gave students a tour of the mobile election center on May 5.
The C-SPAN Bus, which has been following the 2016 campaign trail, was outfitted with computers meant to educate students on the election and some of the major issues in this year’s election. The network’s marketing representatives were on hand to tell the students about the nonpartisan network.
“For the next few months we will be visiting a lot of StudentCam winners, which is a nationwide documentary contest C-SPAN holds every year,” Vanessa Torres, another marketing representative with C-SPAN, said. “What is great about that is that we are able to go to cities we sometimes aren’t able to go to regularly throughout the year.”
According to Torres, the bus was on its way to a StudentCam event in Edison, but stopped in Jamesburg after realizing that GMB Middle School Principal Chad Donahue had made a request for the bus to come by.
“Our mission is to visit schools and talk to students about what we do because a lot of people are not aware of what we do and how we do things,” Torres said.
According to Donahue, it’s important that students have an opportunity to get exposed to politics, as well as technology at play in a professional news-gathering environment.
“It seemed like a really exciting opportunity for the kids to learn about the election and integrating new technologies which is something we are trying to push in the schools,” Donahue said.
“It is really important — this is their future. It is really important that they get engaged now so that they have a good understanding of it for the future, and by doing things like this they can actually have an opportunity to make a change now and realize their voice makes a difference,” said Donahue, continuing that every class in the grade 6-8 school would have the opportunity to tour the bus.
According to Torres, last year the bus visited 126 high schools, 29 universities and colleges and 40 middle schools around the country. Due to the primary election, however, the bus has been unable to make as many school visits as it normally would.
Contact Michael Nunes at mnunes@gmnews.com.
