StateoftheUnion.com and StateoftheState.com and StateoftheCity.com are real-life civics education lessons.

The projects have had two years of testing. This testing was done in California only.

In our first year, 2011, two students from San Francisco, selected by Lowell High School, were sent to Governor Jerry Brown's StateoftheState in Sacramento.

In 2012, a student from Sacramento, selected by the Sacramento USD, attended and reported the StateoftheState event.

Both years, John Burton secured the tickets to the StateoftheState event for the students.

2012 was also the first test of StateoftheCity.com.

The original idea was to send a student from each of California's top ten Cities (by population) to their Mayor's StateoftheCity event.

The idea gained support and momentum.

Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard expanded the project by inviting all high schools in their City.

Then Los Angeles expanded further when LA USD School Board President Monica Garcia invited numerous high schools and numerous students to attend and report at the Los Angeles Mayor's StateoftheCity event.

The tests clearly went better than hoped.

We then spent the next years trying to pull together the entirety of the project by including StateoftheUnion.com into the idea. This was no easy thing but it did finally happen.

Though we did not officially continue tests in 2013, Pasadena did move forward on the project so those students and their reports are posted to StateoftheCity.com and are considered part of the official testing.

All of the student reports during the years of testing will stay posted to the respective sites.

However, these student reports are not necessarily a guideline for future student reports because during the testing the students were given some guidelines in regards to what they were to write about.

In 2015 / 2016 we will conduct another test and include StateoftheUnion.com.