Hi Everyone,

FYI, from a colleague at the PSE&G Foundation, the provider of funding for Live Homework Help NJ.

Sharon Rawlins Youth Services Consultant NJ State Library

The Association for Children in NJ (ACNJ) of Newark, NJ has been asked to participate in a national campaign called Every Child Matters. They are asking every state to organize some event culminating on September 16, to be promoted as Step Up 4 Kids Day. ACNJ would like to involve kids in this project. We need your help!

We want to spread information about issues impacting children in your local community and to encourage the Presidential and Congressional candidates to think about creative solutions to problems facing children in New Jersey.

Kids ages 6 to 18 are invited to submit a video. The video should be between 30 seconds and 2 \xBD minutes long. Please think carefully about what to include in your video so that it is not too long. There are questions that may help focus the video at the end of this article. We reserve the right to reject any submission that does not meet our criteria.

The content of your video should meet a high quality standard. That means use appropriate language and images. Keep it clean! Please do not borrow work someone else did without their permission?.No plagiarizing! We will screen all videos before posting them to our website and reserve the right to reject any that do not meet our standards.

Send your video by email attachment to Step...@acnj.org between July 30th, 2008 and September 12th, 2008. If your video is too large to send as an attachment you may use any number of free upload sites (www.yousendit.com, www.rapidshare.com) then email the download link to us. We will also accept properly formatted CDs sent to Association for Children of New Jersey c/o Alexander Violette, 35 Halsey St. Newark, NJ 07102. DVD and VHS formats will not be accepted.

Be sure to include the first and last name and contact information for at least one member of your group in case we have any questions about your video. Please also tell us the names and ages of the children involved in making the video and where they are from. The city and state is good enough - so that we can let the candidates know if there are any very regionally specific issues.

All submissions become the property of the Association for Children of New Jersey.

We accept Windows Media Video (WMV), Audio Video Interleave (AVI), QuickTime (MOV), and Moving Picture Experts Group (MPG) file formats, which can be transferred from most digital camcorders. For better sound quality we prefer that a plug in microphone is used but it is not required. As we will be using You Tube to host the videos we will be embedding in websites, you may get the best results from converting your file to MPEG4 video with MP3 audio.

Here are some questions that might give you ideas to include in your video:

Level 1: Soft Questions (All Ages)

Level 2: General Political Questions (Middle School and Up)

Level 3: Specific Political Issues and Concepts (High School and Up)

Level 1:

 1. What do you like about America?

 2. What do you know about the election this year?

 3. Does your family talk about politics?

 4. Have any of your teachers talked about the presidential election this year? What did they say?

 5. Elephant or Donkey which one would be more fun as a pet?

 6. What do you think makes a good president?

 7. What are you concerned about? Health, early childhood education, child abuse, after school programs, neighborhood safety?

Level 2:

 1. If you could (can) vote who would you (who are planning to) vote for and why?

 2. What do you think of the two major political parties?

 3. Do you think that the Supreme Court has an important impact on your day to day life?

 4. How do you find out about candidates, news, and politics in general?

 5. Are you interested in the debates? If so what interests you? If not is there anything that 

     could be done to make them more interesting to you?

 6. Where do you think government has done the most good?

 7. What do you think the role of children in politics should be?

Level 3:

 1. Do you think the voting age should be lowered to 16?

 2. What kind of information do you think a voter needs? Has your education prepared you to  be an informed voter?

 3. Are legal curfews and other status offenses fair to children?

 4. Are you concerned about healthcare? How should we address the lack of health insurance in this country?

 5. Should universities allow students and/or professors to have guns on campus?

 6. What is your stance on illegal immigration? Should the children of illegal immigrants receive educational assistance to go to college?

 7. What is the most important issue foreign or domestic that the candidates should be talking about?

All selected videos will be uploaded to our site for public viewing. We will let all the candidates, and the public, know that EVERY CHILD MATTERS and where the videos can be viewed. It is that easy!

We're looking forward to hearing back from you. Please let us know if you are planning to make a video. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Amanda Blagman at 973.643.3876 or abla...@acnj.org.
For more information go to these sites: www.acnj.org or www.makekidscountnj.org or www.kidlaw.org

The following information is a reminder of your current mailing list subscription:

You are subscribed to [list_name] using exam...@example.com.

You may automatically unsubscribe from this list at any time by visiting the following URL:

http://lists.njstatelib.org/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/u/[list]/

If the above URL is inoperable, make sure that you have copied the entire address. Some mail readers will wrap a long URL and thus break this automatic unsubscribe mechanism.

You may also change your subscription by visiting this list's main screen:

http://lists.njstatelib.org/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/list/[list]

If you're still having trouble, please contact the list owner at:

<mailto:sraw...@njstatelib.org>