As of early 2015, a bill in Illinois was passed that requires all public high schools to offer a curriculum dedicated to civic education. This state bill would not have been possible without the world of civic engagement leader and scholar Shawn Healy, who spoke at a Morning Ex on Wednesday December 2.

Once a Chicago high school teacher, Healy now works at the Robert R. McCormick Foundation Civics program as a Civic Learning and Engagement Scholar.

Healy plays a key role in the program, working in areas of public policy and advocacy, and he is the chair of the Illinois Civic Mission Coalition, which works with many schools around Illinois to improve and update civic education curricula. Currently, Healy is a leading advocate in the state for the Democracy School’s Initiative.

Healy works with high schools all over Illinois. He was a main supporter of requiring all high schools to have some sort of civic education program. Healy said, “I spent a good part of this year advocating for legislation to do that.”  In the next years, this state legislature will be enacted in all public high schools.

Parker will not be directly affected by this new legislature, but the impact to the civic work is huge. The state “went from ‘This is important, we’ll support it financially,’ to actually working with other folks around the state to create legislation,” head of Parker’s Civic Engagement Program Elliot said.  “That’s just transformative.”

A large part of Healy’s Morning Exercise was about the importance of getting involved in local elections. “I can tell you as a young person who got involved very early in politics,” Healy said, “that it’s the best way to learn about it, to get involved in it.”

Civic Engagement at Parker embodies many of the principles Heeley promoted. “That’s part of the idea with public events,” Elliott said. “You’re going out into the community, you’re learning, and you’re finding out what’s going on so you can make choices about where you might want to get involved. It’s not the school saying ‘This is how you have to get involved.’”

Much of the civic engagement work done at Parker is centered around what it means to be a responsible citizen in a democratic society. “It has a lot of levels, but to me it starts with caring,” Healy said.  “Seeing what happens in public life, not just government, but in our community is important.  It affects us, if affects our family, it affects our classmates. So just seeing that you have a stake in the process is to me where it starts.”

While Elliott led the school towards being recognized as an Illinois Democracy School, she met Healy. “Ms. Elliot was certainly the point of contact,” Healy said. “I’ve gotten to know Ms. Elliot through being in the same circles of the civic engagement world.”

Elliott first was introduced to Healy at a public event regarding the history of red and blue states in America. “It totally hooked me,” Elliot said. “That really got me interested in what are the possibilities for learning more about politics.”

Through Elliot’s growing work as a civic leader, she was able to meet and eventually work with Healy.

Healy helps give awards to schools that are great examples to the civic education world. “We work with schools throughout the state,” Heeley said, “to really take a look at the extent to which they’re employing best practices in civic learning and building organizational cultures at the school that support that.”

Healy helps support schools in recognizing their strengths and weaknesses. “The reality is every school is doing some great things and the reality also is that every school has some things, that they want to work on,” Healy said. “Ultimately we strengthen the civic mission of schools statewide, and Parker is part of that.”

Before Healy was spending time appointing schools democratic awards, he was teaching high school students about the subjects he was most interested in. “I became a high school teacher because I was interested in politics,” he said. “My thinking was that those ideas would somehow translate to my students.”

Years after teaching, Healy still applies what he learned in the classroom. “Policy at a district level or a state level is not meant to essentially make these experiences for students uniform,” Healy said. “That classroom experience informs all of that work at the various levels of my work.”

Healy, as someone who has studied government and politics for much of his life, believes that being an active citizen is a duty. “We have an obligation to be informed, and that’s a never-ending process,” Healy said. “We have an obligation to be involved, and we talk a lot about voting, but that to me is kind of minimal. It starts with voting, but, as I said at the end of my talk, the important work that happens in our government is what happens after elections.”