CHESTER TWP. There will be no recount at the Black River Middle School.

The unsurprising results are in: George W. Bush has soundly thrashed Al Gore.

The l40 sixth graders participated in an extensive presidential election Project as part of their social studies curriculum. The program culminated on elect ion day, Nov. 7.

With l40 students and nine administrators and teachers voting, the final tally was 98 votes for Bush, 47 votes for Gore and four votes for Ralph Nader, a near parallel of the real Morris County results.

In the actual election, Chester Borough went for Bush (482 votes), compared with Gore (217 votes) and Nader (27 votes). In Chester Township, Bush had 2,101 votes; Gore, 1,032 votes; and Nader, 131 votes.

With the rest of the nation, the sixth graders and their social studies teachers, Kevin Cullen, Patricia Cammarata and Joseph Byrnes, are now awaiting the final results of the real presidential election.

"This year's presidential election was a nightmare for the presidential candidates, but a social studies teacher's dream come true because this election was able to touch on so many issues," said Cullen, creator of the sixth grade presidential election project.

Civics And Computers

Cullen's goal was to develop student interest, awareness and excitement about politics in the United States. The project became both a civics lesson and a computer lesson, as the project was integrated into the Integrated Academics/Media classroom lesson plan.

With the help of computer technology and Internet information, the students and teachers learned first hand the nuts and bolts of the presidential election process from start to finish.

Lending their computer technology expertise to the project was the Black River Middle School sixth grade Integrated Academic teaching team of Joseph Byrne, Patricia Cammarata and Ron Braybrook.

To get the project rolling, the sixth graders in each class were divided into the two major political parties. Each political party was then required to complete four activity assignments: complete a five slide Microsoft PowerPoint commercial presentation for their candidate; write a one page paper on the views of their candidate on Microsoft word; use Microsoft Excel to create a budget spread sheet for each candidate that showed how they spent a campaign budget of $5 million, following fund raising guidelines per state; and finally, each student in a political group developed a campaign poster for their candidate.

The posters were displayed in the sixth grade wing of the school.

From the start of the project, the students had a lot of research to complete. They collected information from the candidates' web sites as they tracked the daily activities of each candidates. To understand the voting patterns of each of the 50 states, students researched past presidential elections and party affiliations of senators, congressmen or governors of each state.

Political Landscape

The students were able to determine which states and regions were strongly Republican, Democratic or evenly split, said Cammarata, sixth grade Social Studies/Integrated Academics teacher.

"Whatever Bush or Gore did or wherever the candidates traveled, the students had to mirror image the candidates," Cammarata said. "The students quickly learned which states were the political battleground states in this presidential election and this helped the students determine where they would concentrate their efforts and campaign budget in the race."

Lois McCarthy, an academic support team teacher and a representative from the League of Women Voters, discussed the voter registration and absentee ballot processes with the students. Sixth graders then completed sample voter registration applications.

Students also worked off their own project web site created by Cullen. The site posted not only the sixth graders vote, but also the voting results of the entire 414 members of the student body at Black River Middle School. Bush also defeated Gore in the school wide vote as well.

On Election Day, Pamela Fiander, the township Superintendant of Schools, was the first to vote in the sixth grade presidential project. The polls opened shortly after the students arrived at school in the morning

Each student signed in at a voting table and was given a voting card. Three students at a time were allowed into the classroom-voting booth. Many of the students dressed in red, white and blue, as they cast their written votes into a ballot box, which was carefully watched by an student election guard.

The students then took home an electoral map of the United States to track the voting returns on election night and returned them to class the next day.

"The issues that concerned me the most were crime, health care and education. From the project I learned a lot about the candidates views on these issues and I also really enjoyed working on the budget activity," said sixth grader Jamie MacDonald.

Another student, Alex Kenny, said, he enjoyed using the Internet to research the issues.

"Gun control is the most important issue to me because it could save someone's life," Kenny said.

Next year Cullen hopes to complete the same election project for the New Jersey gubernatorial campaign. Cullen said that in this unusual election year, "the students learned firsthand that every vote does count."

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