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student perspective to the campaign’s steering committee and, in turn, to encourage my fellow students to support our campaign.” Along with a few friends, including Sycamore and North Central classmate, Joey Mervis, Schwartz founded Students for MSDWT (Metropolitan School District of Washington Township) with a twofold mission: to organize students around the particular campaigns they were working on; and, more broadly, to encourage high school students to engage meaningfully in the school board politics that directly impact their everyday lives.
SCHWARTZ PURSUES VOTING INITIATIVES Jonathan Schwartz (’13) is one of the founders and leaders of Every Vote Counts, and in the fall of 2019, he was invited to sit on a panel entitled “Cast Your Vote: How Students are Shaping American Democracy” at the #SpeechMatters event at the University of California. A junior at Yale, Schwartz is pursuing a double major in Economics and Statistics and Data Science as well as an Advanced Language Certificate in Spanish. Yet his education in the classroom is only part of his story. And he credits his experience at Sycamore as a driver in his ability to juggle his classroom education, his extracurricular work, and his desire to push himself to become a leader. ________________________ Schwartz says his interest in the voting process started during his senior year at North Central High School. “During the fall of my senior year at North Central High School, I was involved with a campaign to pass two funding referenda for Washington Township Schools and to elect the school board candidates endorsed by our district’s parents’ and teachers’ associations,” he says. “My job was to represent the
“Our success was incredible,” he says of the high school program. “Over the course of a few short months, we engaged hundreds of students in phone banking, door knocking, and voter registration. I’ve always been interested in politics, and I chose these particular causes to work on because I care deeply about maintaining high-quality public schools and wanted to do everything I could to support the teachers and administrators who had done so much to support me.” ________________________ Fast forward to his freshman year at Yale in 2017, and Schwartz found himself at the first Every Vote Counts (EVC) meeting in the basement of the Yale library with around 30 students. He says he realized that our democracy, with a voting turnout of less than half of his age group, could be in trouble, and he wanted to do what he could to reverse this course. He joined EVC with the aspiration of building a national, nonpartisan organization dedicated to increasing voter turnout and civic engagement on college campuses. Since then, they’ve built the organization at Yale, hired a full time staff, and expanded to nearly 50 chapters around the country. In addition to his leadership as a founder of the organization, Schwartz serves both as Director of Voter Engagement for the Yale chapter and a member of EVC’s National Advisory Board. In this role as leader of the Yale “Every Vote Counts” group, Schwartz was surprised to learn a large reason for low voter turnout for young voters. “I figured there were students like us all around the country organizing and mobilizing to ensure our
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