Can you say exhaustion????

"Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success."
Henry Ford

After weeks of planning, research and hours on the computer election day is finally over. If you haven't heard me talk about it in the past few weeks, I was in charge of putting on the "mock" election at the school for all 450 students. It all started when Sue and I started talking about what we could do better than what we did for the last election. This year we had it "easy" as we both had student teacher and were able to spend time during the school day to plan and implement our plan.

We had as real an election as any school could have:

• each classroom was assigned a state, each grade had the same number of electoral votes so that no one grade held more power than the others
• each teacher covered the election process and candidates ahead of time
• I created a Power Point on each of the eight candidates on the Ohio ballot and where they stand on several issues ,Tad printed out these slides to help me create a beautiful bulletin board
• Sue went and got the old voting booths from the Board of Elections so that our students were able to have an authentic experience
• I found "I Voted" stickers online after the Board of Elections was unable to provide us with enough stickers for all our students
• The National Honor Society students from the high school came over all throughout the day to be our "poll workers" and were just GREAT!
• We had a mid-day news cast to tell students updated information that was compiled by the student news team. The team spent the entire morning at the polls surveying voters, conducting interviews and compiling data
• Sign in books, and ballots were as close to authentic as possible; one adult made the statement that the sign-in books look just like those at the actual polling locations

Let's just say that we are all tired and glad that the election is over. Even though the exhaustion is setting in, I am glad that we put in all the work that it took to make this a lifelong learning experience for our students. I know that the students might not all the details of what happened, but hope that they remember the experience and that they were able to vote and make a difference.