More than 1000 Iowa State Fairgoers have acquired first-hand knowledge about a new requirement for high school seniors in Iowa.
The Alliance for Civic Education of Iowa has a booth at the state fair, with two tablets that generate 20 randomly selected questions about civics. “People can take a quiz of questions that are on the U.S. Citizenship Civics Test to see if they could pass the test, which high school students are now going to have to take next year in order to graduate,” said Josephine Gitler, founder of the group.
Rhonda Terpstra and her family from Oskaloosa are camping on the fairgrounds and she passed the test earlier this week and her son who’ll be a 9th this year passed it yesterday. “It really wasn’t easy,” Rhonda Tespstra said.
Marcia Vola is one of the volunteers helping people figure out how to use the tablets in the booth to take the test. “I really enjoy the younger ones that come through, the 7th graders, when they realize they don’t know (the answers) because they havent’ had it in school yet. I tell them, ‘Well, you have time to learn now,’” Vola said, with a laugh.
The Class of 2027 will be the first to have passage of this civics test as a requirement for high school graduation. Gitlzer said the most often missed question by fairgoers is the following: When did women get the right to vote? A constitutional amendment to grant women’s suffrage was first introduced in congress in 1878, but it wasn’t until the 19th amendment was ratified on August 18,1920 that women were granted the constitutional right to vote.
