"That energy clearly paid off."

The students fanned out across the stadium to distribute pamphlets about little-known gubernatorial long shot Deval Patrick. Even from across the arena, they could identify each other by the neon green tee-shirts they had received from the campaign that morning. Despite the long train rides to and from the Paul A. Tsongas arena in Lowell, the group of high school students had given up a sunny Saturday in May to work the annual Democratic State Platform Convention. They knew that, in the man who gave his speech that afternoon to a standing ovation, they had found a candidate who was an inspiration, not just an alternative. As Eliza Heath, Class II, a F.L.A.G. member who heard Deval speak for the first time that day, reported, “Hear-ing Patrick speak won me over completely…When he didn’t agree with a view that someone brought up, he said so, but he also explained how he had gotten to his decision and how he planned to work with people who disagreed with him.” Zachary Schwab, Class I, agrees, saying, “After getting to know him, you feel like you can invest absolute trust in him…I hooked on to his campaign [in May 2005] because I trusted him, and he ran his campaign in the way I would have hoped he would.”

 The students were all members of Forward-looking Liberal Action Group (F.L.A.G.) of Milton Academy, the campus group founded by Tara Venkatraman, Class I, in the fall of 2004 as Students for Kerry. Early in 2005, the group had split into subcommittees to investigate each of the potential candidates for the Massachusetts gubernatorial election in 2006. Based on an analysis of where the candidates stood on various issues, the club membership had ended up voting to back Deval Patrick. Now the Plat-form Convention represented F.L.A.G.’s first volunteer work for the candidate.

Over the next 18 months, the students who had volunteered at the Platform Conven-tion, along with many other F.L.A.G. members, spent countless hours collating mailings, stuffing envelopes, and phone banking for Deval Patrick at his campaign headquarters in Charlestown. Their turnout on Saturdays and Sundays during the school year made them the most consistent group of student volunteers of any age, a notable achievement in a campaign fueled by youth volunteerism. Many of them heard the candidate speak on numerous occasions—at the College Democrats convention in Somerville, on the UMass Boston campus, at the Holiday Inn in Brookline—and with numerous other dignitaries, including Senator Barack Obama, Senator Ted Kennedy, and Fomer President Bill Clinton. They held signs, cheered familiar lines, and observed the subtle changes in the stump speech as the campaign wore on. Eliza remembered: “For me, the best moment on the campaign happened during my Class III year…It was rainy and there were only about 50 people there, but he spoke with as much intensity as he did later in front of thousands of people. At that point, the campaign had no money, people were talking about [the campaign] collapsing, and about half of all the student volunteering was being done by F.L.A.G. members, but Patrick spoke as if we were leading the polls no contest. I remember thinking that, even if the campaign never got out of the parking lot, my effort wasn’t being wasted.”

Some students took their support for Patrick a step further and became interns in his campaign; among them were Alicia Driscoll in the summer of 2005 and Hannah Lauber and Tina Nguyen (all Class I) in the summer of 2006. As interns, Hannah said, “we sent out hundreds of mailings, made phone calls, set up canvass packets for people from all over the state and went canvassing ourselves. We made what the campaign managers talked about a reality.”

Both the interns and the many Milton Academy volunteers had the opportunity to see a remarkable campaign take shape and to participate every step of the way. Alicia remembers that, “One of my favorite experiences on the campaign was watching one of Governor Patrick’s first televised interviews along with the other interns and getting to share my thoughts and reactions.

At that point, I really felt as though my perspective mattered.” F.L.A.G. members gathered signatures, sent their parents to town caucuses, staffed the polls the day of the primary, discussed the gubernatorial debates with friends and neighbors, and made final Get-Out-The-Vote phone calls on Election Day. As the grass-roots campaign grew from that small group in the parking lot to a statewide movement, so did the students’ sense of accomplishment and achievement. “It made me nervous to see so many commercials on TV for Gabrieli or Kerry [Healey], but none for Deval. But at the same time, I knew that I was part of what was keeping him in the game,” reported Zach.

Echoing Zach’s remarks, all of the students—about 30 all told—experienced elation at every Patrick success and even redoubled their efforts for a final victory as the race got closer. Eliza revealed that, “My favorite campaign activity was phone banking in the last stretch of the race. Coming into a room full of mostly teenagers and college students, finding a little corner to work in, and praying that I had enough free minutes on my cell phone to keep my mom from killing me for making five hundred phone calls in one afternoon—that’s when I knew I was part of something huge.” Gail Waterhouse, Class II, also remembered the last weeks of the campaign as a highlight, saying, “The best moment of the campaign was going down to Worcester a couple weeks before the election for a rally. President Clinton and Senator Kennedy, two very inspirational speakers, were there…So many people showed up to give support to Deval Patrick and Tim Murray—I think we filled the entire Worcester DCU Center. I came away from that experience completely reenergized and ready to finish out the campaign strong.”

That energy clearly paid off. On the evening of Tuesday, November 7, 2006, several of the Milton Academy students who trickled into the Hynes Convention Center were wearing their neon green tee-shirts from the 2005 Platform Convention. Many arrived straight from headquarters; other students had volunteered to staff the Election Night event, while still others arrived directly from after-school commitments. As the group gathered in the Center of the packed convention Center and rumors that the TV news stations had called the election for Patrick began to fly, the students exchanged high-fives and hugs, feeling as though this victory was their victory. They had experienced—and contributed to—the rare case of a political underdog’s come-from-behind win. As Gail put it, “Everyone complains about how apathetic teens are toward current events, and I think that students getting involved in a gubernatorial campaign really turned heads and made people realize that what Deval had to say was important and that his ideas were innovative and exciting.”

Kenzie Bok ’07
Tara Venkatraman ’07

 

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