STUDENTS ASSUME GOVERNMENT POSITIONS

Students from five area high schools took over local decision-making Wednesday during the 13th annual Optimist Youth in Government Day.

Seventy students from Cape Girardeau Central, Notre Dame, Jackson, Oak Ridge and Delta high schools participated by assuming roles of city, county and federal government officials for a day. The event is sponsored by the four Cape Girardeau and two Jackson Optimist clubs.

Students and their role models spent the morning touring Jackson and Cape Girardeau government offices and discussing issues facing local government officials. City council meetings were then held to give the students a new view of how government works.

"it's a challenging job," said Dean Bucher, a Jackson High School senior who served as mayor on the mock Jackson board of aldermen. "The decision-making was harder than I expected."

Mock alderman Burt Hahs, a senior at Jackson High School, said he thought serving as an elected official would have been easier. "I know I couldn't do it. It was pretty tough," he said.

Students at the Jackson mock council meeting were given a mock agenda of real issues. The students discussed whether they should improve funding to maintain and upgrade service to the city's parks, to establish a citywide curfew to curb vandalism by teen-agers, to support a bond issue to finance construction of a multipurpose complex, and to allow random inspections in and around schools by police canine units.

The only measure the mock Jackson council supported was the random canine inspections. After discussing whether the inspections would be an invasion of privacy, students authorized random inspections at least twice monthly.

"Anything we can do to hinder drug use is a good idea," said Bucher.

The Cape Girardeau mock council also addressed issues that have recently come before the council, including increasing various fees and setting pet ordinances. Thomas M. Meyer, chairman of the event, said the students were obviously aware of the issues in their community and had good questions and opinions.

"They're pretty sharp and did a good job," he said. "They were reading the paper when some of these issues came up, so they had good questions."

Meyer said it is possible the Cape Girardeau City Council could again adopt an ordinance naming mock council members to a youth advisory council. Council members passed such an ordinance following Youth in Government Day last year, and the advisory council was consulted on several issues with success, he said.

"We all didn't know what to expect last year, but it turned out to be very successful," he said. "I know the students are genuinely interested in being named to an advisory council this year."