Youngsters Pick Up on Power Politics in Utah : Education: A creative elementary school principal urges his charges to come up with beneficial ideas and turn them into law. They succeed on a number of fronts.

Bruce R. Barnson is an ample, suspender-wearing educator with unfashionably long sideburns and a beguiling belief that politics is too important to be left to adults.

For nearly a decade, the elementary school principal has urged his 11- and 12-year-old charges to get down and dirty in state politics. Come up with an idea to benefit the commonweal, Barnson tells them, then lobby relentlessly to ram it through the Legislature.

Through cunning, manipulation of the media, moral righteousness and old-fashioned political muscle, the students have assembled a record that would be the envy of any Capitol Hill power broker: Among other triumphs, they have pushed through a mandatory seat-belt law and a resolution opposing nuclear waste dumping in Utah.

This year, the children’s crusade is going national by asking Congress to extend Daylight Saving Time another week to give trick-or-treaters an extra hour of light on Halloween.

Empowerment of the young comes easily in Utah, which is the most youthful state in the Union thanks to a Mormon zeal for big families. One-third of the state’s 1.7 million people are under 15; the median age in Utah is 26, compared to 32 nationwide.

As the state’s 1990 “Statistical Abstract” notes, “Utah’s young population has placed unprecedented demands on the state’s public education system during the last decade.” Utah has the nation’s most crowded classrooms, with a student-teacher ratio of 25.4 to 1; teachers earn less than their counterparts in 43 other states, and Utah ranks 50th in average annual expenditure per student.

For Barnson, who was named Utah’s most distinguished elementary principal two years ago, all those youngsters are not so much a problem as an opportunity. After growing up on a farm in southern Utah, Barnson dropped out of college, did a stint in the Army, then labored in an open-pit copper mine in Nevada. Working the graveyard shift one night, he had a revelation--that “only coyotes and prostitutes work these kinds of hours”--and returned to school to eventually earn a doctorate in education from Brigham Young University.

In 1983, three years after Barnson became principal at Ridgecrest Elementary School, his fifth-graders launched their first, modest “legislative project.” Utah, they realized, had a state motto, “Industry”; a state bird, the sea gull; a state song, “Utah, We Love Thee”; even a state fish, the rainbow trout. One thing it didn’t have was a state bug. In the Beehive State, the leading candidate was somewhat self-evident.

Armed with statistics about the honey industry and the bee’s value to agriculture, a dozen pint-sized lobbyists worked over the state Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee. As a school scrapbook later put it, “They also learned to deal with opposition and some ridicule.” But when then-Gov. Scott Matheson signed SB216 into law, he called it “the bright spot of the session.”

A year later, the students returned to the Statehouse with a weightier issue; in a meeting with Matheson, they noted that Utah was one of only nine states with no “child safety restraint” law. The governor, having twice failed to pass seat-belt legislation, urged the children to “march right upstairs to the Legislature” and press the issue.

They did that and more--manning observation posts near the school to count how many auto occupants were wearing seat belts, raising $20,000 for a “buckle up” billboard campaign, and sending educational packets to other schools. Over bitter opposition from state senators, who warned darkly about trampling “parents’ rights,” a bill requiring mandatory belting for children under age 5 passed the Senate 21 to 5 and eventually became law.

Nuclear waste came next. Noting that geologists had identified a subterranean salt dome in one of Utah’s national parks potentially suitable for a temporary storage site for radioactive matter, Barnson’s students conducted a public opinion poll on the issue in Salt Lake County. Not surprisingly--nuclear waste is about as popular here as a contagious skin disease--85% of the respondents opposed the idea. The Legislature passed, and the governor signed, a resolution reflecting that sentiment.

Such exercises, the school scrapbook declares, “foster patriotism, free enterprise and involved citizenship,” while suggesting “the value of individual influence.”

Students also learn a little bare-knuckled politics, as demonstrated in their most recent enterprise: placing the statue of a famous Utahn in the U.S. Capitol.

More than a century ago, Congress authorized each state to erect statues of two native sons--or daughters--in the hallowed halls. In 1950, Utah’s Brigham Young joined the pantheon; four years ago, students at Ridgecrest concluded that the time had come to fill the second niche. They drafted a list of 21 significant figures in Utah’s history and asked 27 elementary schools around the state to list their favorites; a slightly smaller list was sent to 501 homes here in Sandy, and the students conducted an informal survey at a downtown mall.

The clear favorite was one Philo T. Farnsworth, an inventor who is considered the father of television. A bill supporting Farnsworth’s immortalization passed the Utah House and cleared a Senate committee, but trouble appeared from an unexpected quarter: Advocates of hotel magnate J. Willard Marriott, a native son from northern Utah, outmaneuvered the children by tabling and eventually killing the Farnsworth bill.

In the ‘87-’88 school year, Barnson’s students tried again, only to see history begin to repeat itself. A Farnsworth bill cleared committees in both chambers, but the Marriott forces, who wanted their own man in Washington, bottled up Farnsworth in the Senate Rules Committee. It was time for hardball. As the school scrapbook recounted, “The committee finally let it out when, at our request, the TV stations asked why our bill was being held.” After some more skin-of-the-teeth maneuvering, the bill finally became law, and a statue of Philo T. Farnsworth will soon appear in the U.S. Capitol.

Barnson, who moved to Silver Mesa Elementary School this year, is slightly pessimistic about congressional willingness to extend daylight saving time, although the Utah Legislature supports the idea. The junior lobbyists are trying to compile statistics on the number of children killed by automobiles at dusk on Halloween, but that has been a difficult task. Persuading the lawmakers on Capitol Hill to tinker with the national clock also seems a bit daunting. “Our only ally is reason,” Barnson sighed, “and I’m not sure reason works in smoke-filled rooms.”