Coronado High School Students Host Political Forum

It wasn’t your typical political candidate. There was only one candidate and you would have been had pressed to find an adult in the audience, but there were plenty of people interested in the upcoming gubernatorial election who were paying very close attention.

“None of us can vote right now, but we’re still making a difference,” Jackie Wang said. “The youth are our future. We are the driving force of what’s gonna happen tomorrow.”

The political forum was hosted by Coronado High School students on Friday and featured Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Bill White.

“If you looked at my Facebook page and look at all the comments that are made by young people, you’d see their interest in public affairs is alive and well,” White said.

White took the stage in front 800 students from high schools across the city, but one person who was noticeably absent was his opponent, Gov. Rick Perry.

“He had scheduling conflicts, and we understand that, we wanted to work around that, but we couldn’t,” Wang said.

Friday morning, however, the governor’s Twitter page said he spent the morning taking a run with his dog.

Dozens of students sent questions for today’s forum on Facebook.

“From all those questions, we took days and weeks, to look at them and see what they youth really wanted to talk about,” said Rachel Jackson, who helped organize the event.

“A lot of questions were talking about education or the violence in Mexico,” Jackson said. “Today we only got to ask about four of those questions. We wanted to ask about 15 questions, but we’re going to send those questions to the Bill White campaign and we’re going to ask him to answer those questions for us on Facebook.”