Home School Heartbeat Radio Program

Michael Farris:
My guest today is Ned Ryun, Director of Generation Joshua, HSLDA's civic activism program for homeschoolers. Ned, welcome to the program.

Ned Ryun:
Thanks, Mike.

Mike:
Ned, the 2004 general election was the first since Generation Joshua started. How did you get students involved in the election, and how successful were their efforts?

Ned:
Well, Mike, what we did during the year was get them to be thinking about the elections. We had civics education, we had voter registration efforts, and we started talking about the Student Action Teams early on in the year, giving them the vision to be involved. And what we did is we had the students volunteer for the HSLDA PAC Student Action Teams, and it was extremely successful. By the time we had everyone counted, it was over a thousand students involved. We were involved in nine races; eight of them were victories. And to see these young people doing this work over the last four to five days of an election was extremely inspiring and extremely effective. We were involved in some very key Senate races, with Tom Coburn, Jim DeMint, John Thune; we were involved in the presidential race in the key battleground states. What we did is we had the students going door to door; we had them doing phone banking; we had them doing sign waving. And in a lot of these areas, we exceeded our target of how many doors we were going to hit.

Mike:
It sounds like all the students deserve congratulations on a job well done. I'm Mike Farris.