Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., talks with students before a student interview at Mater Academy Mountain Vista campus Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2023. The interview will be included in a national CSPAN video documentary contest.
Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2023 | 2 a.m.
Lake Mead means a lot to Dayvon Alvarez.
He remembers summers past when he’d swim there often with friends, like the thousands of others who have visited the largest man-made water reservoir in the U.S. Alvarez, an eighth-grader at Mater Academy Mountain Vista — a K-8 free public charter school in the east valley — wants to make sure others are afforded that simple pleasure in the future as well.
Lake Mead is so important to Alvarez that he’s making it the subject of a short documentary to be entered in a national contest later this month. And with the help of Mater Academy, he was able to sit down to interview U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., about the body of water that is key to the future of Las Vegas and the American Southwest.
“I’ve learned a lot about Lake Mead, and how the drought it’s going through has impacted the community,” said Alvarez, 14, adding that he also interviewed officials with the Southern Nevada Water Authority. “Throughout these months, it’s been hard to find evidence, but it’s been easier now with these interviews.”
Since October, Alvarez has been researching the effects of the historic drought on Lake Mead.
Cortez Masto on Tuesday visited Alvarez and roughly a hundred other students at Mater Academy, where she explained the nature of her work as a senator. Then she sat down with Alvarez and a couple of his classmates, all of whom are working on separate entries for StudentCam, an annual short documentary contest promoted by C-SPAN that encourages students to think critically about issues affecting the nation and their community, according to the contest’s entry page.
This year, participating students from grades 6-12 were asked to create a five-minute documentary related to the theme “If you were a newly elected member of Congress, which issue would be your first priority and why?”
Pretty open-ended, right? With such a personal question, students should get to hear from lawmakers themselves, reasoned Chris Wallace, who teaches speech and debate classes at Mater Academy and is helping oversee the documentary projects.
“We also got Sen. (Jacky) Rosen, so we got both of our U.S. senators for the state to participate,” Wallace said. “And then we also had three state senators and a city councilwoman from Las Vegas as well.”
Cash awards will be given to the top 150 student documentaries nationally, with prizes totaling $100,000, according to C-SPAN. The top individual prize is $5,000, Wallace said, and more than $1.2 million has been awarded to students and teachers since the competition’s inception in 2004.
The contest is open to students from grades six through 12, with middle-schoolers and high schoolers competing in their own respective categories. Students are allowed to compete individually, or can work in teams of two or three.
That allows for students to work together in a collaborative environment, which has paid big dividends for the Mater Academy entrants, said Wallace, 33. They have been working with a media studies class, where ultimately the speech and debate students write scripts and perform interviews, while the media studies students shoot, edit and produce footage.
“The media and production side, that’s all their bread and butter,” Wallace said. “But having them work as a team has been really, really good.”
Aside from Alvarez, two other students were able to sit down with Cortez Masto on Tuesday to interview her for their projects.
One entry focused on paving a legal pathway for citizenship for migrants looking to move to the U.S. The other highlighted the divide in access to high-speed internet among urban and rural areas across the state, and how connectivity issues can exacerbate disparities in health care and education.
All three of the topics are important issues for Cortez Masto and her constituents.
“It’s really personal for me,” said Yadira Cardenas, an eighth-grader who asked Cortez Masto about her work advocating for citizenship for recipients of DACA, a federal program that started under the Obama administration that sought to eventually provide citizenship for immigrants brought here as children.
“She’s going to help my video make a clear message to them about how immigrants should have an easier way to become a citizen.”
“I’m just so impressed and so pleased that the work I get to do continues to support this charter school and the principals and the teachers who are giving our students credible skills,” Cortez Masto told the Sun. “I think it’s just incredible to see so many students at a young age that are already engaged. It benefits not only them but their families and our state, our community and our future.”
Regardless of what the students were working on, what was even more impressive was that students were learning the core tenets of debate that sometimes go by the wayside, Cortez Masto said. That includes learning skills like delivering a convincing argument while also recognizing, in a civil manner, why others may have an opposing viewpoint.
Those skills will translate beyond the classroom, Cortez Masto told the students. And even better, she added, those are skills that are carried around for a lifetime.
“Here’s what I know: I’m here talking with you because, some day, one of you or many of you are going to be doing what I’m doing,” the senator told the group. “And I believe in your ability to achieve it.”
