Nearly 50 New Hampshire middle and high school students traded a day of regular classes this week to stand in front of a panel of civic leaders at Saint Anselm College and argue, with footnotes, for lower health care costs, stronger climate protections, more housing, better wages, and serious criminal justice reform. Their teachers had paired them up across districts and across grade levels and asked them to pick an issue, research it, and present what they would do about it. As NHPR’s Annmarie Timmins reported, the result was an unusually substantive afternoon that sounded, at moments, less like a school assembly and more like a roundtable of state legislators in their own committee room.
The event was the New Hampshire installment of the Mikva Challenge, a national civics program now run in the Granite State by NH Civics. The premise of the Mikva Challenge is simple: middle and high school students are asked to identify an issue they care about, research it, and present their findings and recommended actions to a panel of adult decision makers. The Pittsfield, Weare, and other participating students brought the program to its New Hampshire stage at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College.
What The Students Pitched
The presentations covered the same ground that consumes most of the legislative session in Concord: housing affordability, wage stagnation, energy and climate policy, criminal justice, and the state of health care. The students did not always agree with each other, and they did not always agree with the adults in the room. They did, by all accounts, do their homework.
One group made an argument that would have sounded familiar at a Senate Finance Committee hearing. New Hampshire’s low taxes are an asset, the students said, but the state needs more housing and better wages to actually attract the workers those taxes are designed to keep here. The pitch was not radical. It was, in fact, the same argument that has been made by every major NH employer association for the past five years. The fact that it came out of the mouths of teenagers who cannot yet vote was, for the audience, the point.
Another group argued for a significant expansion of renewable energy in the state’s generation mix, framing it less as a climate question than as a long-term cost question for ratepayers. A third focused on criminal justice reform with an emphasis on diversion programs for first-time offenders.
The most striking pitch, by the account NHPR published, came from a pair of students focused on women’s health care. Elsie Brooks, a junior at Pittsfield Middle High School, told the panel that women’s pain is routinely underplayed in clinical settings and attributed to emotional rather than physical causes.
“Women’s pain is often underplayed. It is attributed to being overly emotional,” Brooks said. “The first step that we can take is acknowledging that women’s pain is real, it is serious and if we pay more attention to it, we can really change the way that health care in America works.”
Brooks’s partner, Mackenzie Urie, a 7th grader at Weare Middle School, also chose health care, and she chose it because she wants to be a nurse. The pairing of a middle schooler with a high school junior, both focused on the same issue from different vantage points, is exactly the model NH Civics has built the program around.
A Voice The Students Said They Do Not Always Get
Urie was direct about why the program mattered. She told the audience that students are listened to selectively, and that programs like this one create a platform that the school day usually does not.
“I feel like there’s some people that hear young voices, but then there’s other people that don’t really care about young voices because they think that they’re not really that important,” Urie said.
That comment cut to the heart of why a program like Mikva exists. The frustration Urie articulated is not unique to New Hampshire and not unique to her age group. The Mikva Challenge was launched in the late 1990s in Chicago, named for the late Judge Abner Mikva, with the explicit premise that students who learn how to engage civic institutions while they are still in school are more likely to remain engaged voters and community members as adults. The program has since spread to multiple states and now operates in New Hampshire through NH Civics.
Brooks framed the next step in concrete terms. For her personally, the experience pointed toward a possible career in women’s health. For her classmates, she said, the path forward was straightforward.
“For some other people, it’s bringing these issues to legislature and bringing these issues to their school board, to their community members, to their parents even, and saying, ‘Hey, I really believe this is an issue. And I really believe I have a solution.’”
The students left the event wearing shirts that read “Democracy is a verb.”
Why Saint Anselm
The choice of venue mattered. The New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College has been the state’s most prominent host of presidential-cycle politics since the Institute opened in 2001, and it has been a setting for everything from primary debates to civics summits in non-election years. Hosting roughly 50 middle and high school students for a Mikva Challenge presentation day puts the program in a building students from Pittsfield and Weare may otherwise see only on a class trip during a presidential primary cycle.
That association matters for civics pedagogy. One of the persistent challenges in New Hampshire civics education is bridging the gap between abstract knowledge of how government is supposed to work and a felt sense that government is something a regular person can engage with. Putting a Pittsfield 11th grader on a stage at the Institute of Politics, in front of a panel of civic leaders who actually run things, is a more powerful answer to that question than any worksheet. It puts the student in the room.
Where This Fits In New Hampshire’s Civics Push
The Mikva Challenge is one piece of a broader and growing investment in civics education in New Hampshire. The state’s curriculum requirements have shifted over the past several biennia, and a new generation of legislators has begun building parallel programs. NHPR reported earlier this week on a separate proposal from a state lawmaker to create a summer civics camp aimed at giving New Hampshire students a more direct voice in policies that affect them. NH Civics, the nonprofit that brought the Mikva Challenge to Saint Anselm, also runs a teacher training pipeline and curriculum support arm that puts the program inside individual classrooms across the state.
The broader push is tied to a series of policy debates the state has been having for years about what schools should teach, how they should teach it, and what the state should be willing to fund. Those debates have intensified in the wake of fights over school choice and education reform, the end of state oversight on homeschool education, and the chronic strain on New Hampshire’s K-12 system. Civics programming, in that context, is one of the few areas where there is meaningful bipartisan support, in part because the underlying skill, learning how to engage public institutions, is something both Republicans and Democrats can claim a stake in.
The program is also part of a longer-running NHPR engagement with civics, including the network’s Civics 101 podcast and its ongoing coverage of local civic documenter and journalism programs that put the tools of public-interest reporting in the hands of community members.
Why This Story Matters Beyond The Day
It is easy to read a story about middle schoolers presenting policy ideas and treat it as a feel-good civics moment. The more accurate reading is that programs like the Mikva Challenge are a concrete answer to a measurable problem. National survey data has consistently shown declining civics knowledge among young Americans for two decades, and political-science researchers have repeatedly documented that the strongest predictor of adult civic engagement is whether a person had a meaningful, structured civics experience in middle or high school. That is not a metaphor. It is the literature.
When a 7th grader from Weare and a junior from Pittsfield can stand in front of a Saint Anselm panel and articulate a coherent argument about gender disparities in pain assessment in clinical settings, the program has done something specific. It has given those two students a referenceable experience of being listened to in a public setting by adults who run things. That experience is the unit of civic engagement, and it does not happen by accident. It happens because someone built a program, recruited the schools, paired the students, scheduled the venue, and gave the kids the time to do the research.
The students walked out of the Institute of Politics with shirts that said “Democracy is a verb.” That is the slogan, and it is also the policy intervention. Democracy is, in fact, a verb, and verbs require practice. A program that makes the practice possible is a program that pays off, demographically and civically, for decades.
What To Watch Next
The most consequential follow-through from a Mikva Challenge day is what the students do after they take the shirts off. Brooks said she sees her experience as the foundation for a possible career in women’s health. Urie wants to be a nurse. Several of the other groups talked about bringing their issues to their school boards or to their state representatives. Some of those conversations will happen, and some will not. NH Civics tracks alumni and outcomes through its programmatic evaluation work, and the data on Mikva Challenge alumni in other states has historically shown elevated rates of civic engagement well into adulthood.
For New Hampshire, the more immediate question is whether the state’s appetite for funding civics infrastructure, both in schools and through nonprofits like NH Civics, holds up against competing budget priorities in the next biennium. That fight will play out in Concord, not in the auditorium at Saint Anselm. But the kids who presented this week will be the constituents who carry the political memory of whether that fight was won or lost. They are paying attention. They told us so.
