Students from Sprague High School in Salem and Lincoln High School in Portland are co-champions of a national civics competition that tests students’ knowledge and understanding of the U.S. Constitution. But it’s how they won that has made this year’s “We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution National Finals” one for the history books.
Sprague High School’s team consisted of just two members, seniors Matthew Meyers and Colin Williams. They won a spot at the national finals in Washington, D.C. after winning second place in the state competition in January, behind Lincoln High School.
At the finals, Meyers and Williams faced off against teams with 20 or more players in the three-day competition, fielding questions about constitutional law and Supreme Court cases from a panel of judges and legal experts. When the scores of all 32 teams were tallied, the duo from Salem was initially declared winners on April 11, with the Lincoln team finishing in third place. But according to reporting by The Oregonian and The New York Times, Patrick Magee-Jenks, who teaches social studies at Lincoln High and coaches its constitution team, found what appeared to be a mistake in his team’s score.
That prompted officials at The Center for Civic Competition, which organizes the annual competition, to investigate and correct the scoring results, with both Sprague and Lincoln High School prevailing as this year’s national champions.
Meyers and Williams join us to talk about this remarkable outcome, along with Magee-Jenks and Audrey Farrimond, a junior at Lincoln High School and member of its constitution team.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Oregon has long dominated the national civics competition that tests high school students’ knowledge and understanding of the U.S. Constitution. But even so, this year was special. Because of a scoring error, teams from Sprague High School in Salem and Lincoln High School in Portland were named co-champions of this year’s national finals. What’s more, the team from Sprague consisted of just two students, even though they were competing against teams from around the country with 30 or more participants.
Those two Sprague students, seniors Matthew Meyers and Colin Williams, join me now, along with Lincoln High School junior Audrey Farrimond and Patrick Magee-Jenks, who teaches social studies at Lincoln and coaches the school’s constitution team. It’s great to have all four of you on the show.
Patrick Magee-Jenks: Thank you, glad to be here.
Matthew Meyers: Thank you.
Miller: Matthew, I want to start with the roller coaster of this. Can you give us a sense for what it was like in D.C. when they announced that you had won the competition?
Meyers: It was a little unbelievable. If you watch our reactions, it’s kind of just blank. There’s not this huge dopamine head. It’s just like an “Error 404, doesn’t compute.” We were obviously incredibly happy that day, but if anything, we were more happy just to make top 10 and second at state, because our goal has always been to compete as long as possible. You want to do well … it’s regional, so you can move out of state, do well at state so you can go into nationals, etc. And then after you make the top 10 at nationals, then there’s no higher level – whether you place 10th or first. So it was an extremely high high, but if anything, it wasn’t quite as high as the night before.
Miller: Colin, in the video I watched from that moment, there was a huge roar from the crowd. And the crowd, I think, seemed to be made up of the people I would have thought would be your competitors, people from around the country. It seems like they were genuinely happy to see you win. Why do you think they rallied around you so much?
Colin Williams: I think they rallied around us because they like the underdog story. I think the magnitude of the achievement is not lost on Matthew and I. And I think people were excited to see a team from a school in a region that historically hasn’t really been super competitive.
Sprague has only … I think this is our third competitive year ever, and the last two were COVID and pre-COVID. Even when we were a competitive team, we didn’t make it past regionals. So to see a team the size of ours make it as far as we did, I think got people really excited, certainly about civics learning at a time when it kind of feels like it’s a lost art.
Miller: Patrick, the story that has been covered in The New York Times, The Oregonian, OPB, other places is that after this competition, you got back to Oregon and then you were rechecking the scores, which led you to see what seems to you to be an error on the part of the judges. What made you want to look back at those scores?
Magee-Jenks: Well, I’m a teacher and feedback is important, so I like to review rubrics. And I was just looking to see where we dropped some points and what we can do to get better for next year.
Miller: Oh, like any coach saying, “OK, I’m going to go back to the video and see where we didn’t get the right matchups” or something.
Magee-Jenks: Exactly. I found one total tally column that looked a little low, so I said, “OK, where did we drop points here?” And then I realized that actually, out of a total of 50 points, we only lost one point, and that’s not what the math showed. So I had to bring that to the attention of the Center for Civic Education.
Miller: What did they say?
Magee-Jenks: They said, “Oh yeah, I think you’re right, we’ll look into this.”
Miller: How did it go from that to ... I saw a video of an announcement, the leader of that organization telling Audrey, you and the other members of the Lincoln team you guys actually had the highest number of points and you’ll be co-champions. How did that video happen?
Magee-Jenks: Well, there were a few hours before I heard back after they said that they were going to look into things, so at that point, my mind was going that every judge’s scorecard in the whole competition would have the same error and this is going to affect every school in the competition.
Luckily it didn’t. It was only limited to two teams – one from Oregon and one from Colorado. So after that, the director of CCE contacted me and said how apologetic she is and how horrible she felt that our school didn’t get the chance to celebrate together in Washington, D.C. So I asked her, since she was trying to figure out how to make things better, to record a video that I could share to my students. So she provided that to me. And that was what you saw on the video, the grand reveal. I had to keep this secret for about 24 hours before I could tell my class.
Miller: For a whole day, you knew that these students you spent a lot of time with and had worked really hard, that they, too, were going to be official champions with the highest score, but you couldn’t tell them?
Magee-Jenks: It was the hardest secret to keep.
Miller: Audrey, what was it like for you to get that news eventually the next day? This is this past Wednesday.
Audrey Farrimond: It was crazy. I mean, obviously we’re all super thrilled with third. That was way above what I had expected to get when we went to nationals. But when she told us we had got first, it felt like a dream. I was like, “Oh my gosh! There’s no way this is real.” Because this is the kind of thing that you think in your head, like, oh, this is a scenario you make up, but it ended up being true. And it was super great to hug all my friends and see all the work that we put in together pay off.
Miller: How would you describe the relationship that you and your Lincoln teammates developed with Matthew and Colin, from a competing Oregon high school?
Farrimond: There was definitely a lot of Oregon pride. We spent a lot of time with Sprague, and personally, I feel like a lot of us just became good friends with them. We were so happy for them during the award ceremony. There was no one cheering louder for them than we were. The second we got third, we all had our fingers crossed for Sprague.
Miller: If it can’t be us, hopefully it’ll be our new friends.
Farrimond: Yeah, and that was just super heartwarming to have that experience. Obviously, all of us were very impressed by the amount of effort and intelligence they put in.
Miller: Matthew, it’s been a little while since we’ve talked about the “We the People” competitions. Can you just remind us or tell some of our newer listeners how these competitions work?
Meyers: Basically, there are six units that each have to deal with the different aspects of the Constitution or that are somehow related to civics, like the historical and foundations of the Constitution or the modern problems with it. Those six units each have three different prompts and you have to write a speech responding to each of those prompts that lasts four minutes. After that speech, you have to give a Q&A for eight minutes.
Those questions can be anything tangential to what you said in the speech or the general topics. Like, if you talk about Voltaire in the speech, they can ask you to talk more about Voltaire or say, “What about some other enlightenment thinkers? How did they contribute?” And that’s functionally how each speech works.
Miller: And Colin, if you’re going up against teams that had a maximum number of potential participants of 36 and it was just the two of you, did that mean you were doing, I don’t know, 15, 16, 18 times as much work as some of your fellow contestants?
Williams: I mean, we weren’t getting more man hours, so we did have to be more efficient. There’s something as well where, when you’re a team of two, we’re on every unit. A lot of kids are only on one unit. So if Matthew and I were doing research and we found some data points, something that we can bring up in Q&A, we can use that for all six Q&A’s.
Whenever we learn stuff … Like, if one person on a team with 36 kids learns something, they can only use that for their unit. And if other units want to use that, they have to learn it again, too. Whereas, with Matthew and I, we learn one thing and then that just unlocks that information for every unit; which, when you think about it, means that the value of every piece of information gets multiplied by six.
Also just the comfort in, you do research for units one, two – there’s six units – and if we’re doing it roughly in order, by the time you reach the last unit, you hardly need to do any additional research because the units are all very interrelated. As a result, we didn’t actually have to put in 18 times the man hours. Obviously, in one weekend we would sometimes do 18 hours of work. It was obscene amounts of work and our sleep schedules kind of suffered for it. But we weren’t putting in 18 times the hours of your average competitor because we had to get really innovative with how efficient those hours were.
Miller: Yeah, because those do not exist in the universe as we know it, if you were spending 18 hours for a weekend.
Audrey, I want to zoom out to the biggest picture here. How much did you all get into current events? This is high schoolers learning about, talking about the Constitution at a time when the phrase “constitutional crisis” has never been used as much in my lifetime, in 50 years or so, let alone in yours. How much did you talk about what’s happening right now?
Farrimond: I was on unit two, which is a more historical unit, so I didn’t get into current events as much as other units, but that’s definitely something that I studied. And it’s very interesting to look at what’s going on in the news from a civics learning perspective. I think that it adds a lot of value because you know all of the Supreme Court cases that they’re using as precedent for all of the new decisions coming out. You know what was going through the framers’ heads while they were writing the constitution and what they were intending to do with the powers they’re giving to the president. So that’s definitely coming up.
It’s also a weird way to look at it, where you’re kind of removed from it because you’re learning it so that you can spout it out in a competition. I think that it was helpful for me because I was able to compartmentalize the news and the media, and understand it in a new way that was helpful.
Miller: Matthew, how have you been thinking about what’s happening in current political life right now through the prism of what you’ve been learning for this competition?
Meyers: I think it’s always … there’s no radically different shift that I’ve had. Every new piece of information makes the prism a little bit bigger. You can find more historical antecedents, you can find other case law for or against different arguments. But in general, it’s mostly just reaffirmed, as Colin once said, that a lot of what’s going on now is just patently offensive to human reason. The goal of learning just to validate what you already think, that has been ultimately the effect.
Miller: Patrick, what does it mean to you to do this work, in addition to teaching social studies, to be the leader of this team?
Magee-Jenks: Well, first of all, it fills me with an immense level of pride. This is the seventh year that I’ve brought a competing team, at least to the state level, and my first national championship, so I’m very proud of that. I think, more than the hardware and the placing, I’m proud of the people that my students have become. I’m proud of their display of collegiality with competing teams like Colin and Matthew. I’m just blown away with their work ethic and their teamwork. Those are the kind of things that you can’t really capture in any kind of competition, but are lifelong lessons that I think that they’ll take with them forever.
Miller: Patrick, Audrey, Colin and Matthew, congratulations to all of you.
All: Thank you.
Miller: Patrick Magee-Jenks is a Lincoln High School social studies teacher, the teacher of the constitution team class there. Audrey Farrimond is on that team. She’s a junior at Lincoln High School. Colin Williams and Matthew Meyers are seniors at Sprague High School in the Salem-Keizer School District. Both Sprague High School and Lincoln High School are sharing the national championship in the “We the People” competition for this year.
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