Breaking through the political noise
Westhill High group launches political app
STAMFORD — Many seniors check out for their last few weeks of school, but a group of students at Westhill instead spent the waning hours of their high school careers with eyes fixed on an event set to fall a year and a half after their graduation.
Gathered at Grace Farms in New Canaan each day, they spent time researching candidates and creating an app to help educate people about the emerging race for president of the United States.
Their result, PoliTalk, went live on Apple’s app store last week, describing itself as “unbiased political information.” It’s a comprehensive list of the candidates with detailed descriptions of the their views on a range of issues from “Budget and Economy” to “Environment” to “Women’s Rights.”
“We decided we wanted to portray our student voice and provide something that could be useful in this polarized political environment,” said Julien Matrullo, one of the app’s founders.
Matrullo created the app along with 13 other Westhill seniors as part of a self-designed internship,
an option available to Westhill seniors for the last few weeks of school.
The idea for PoliTalk came about last January when Matrullo and his friend Jordan Jang were spitballing ideas about how to break through the partisan divide. When the internship time came around, fellow friends and politically minded seniors joined the group.
“I think we all recognized that we had a common interest in leaving a legacy, leaving a mark, and we came up with the PoliTalk idea and everyone sort of took interest in that as well,” said Rishi Jaaswal, one of PoliTalk’s creators and a soon-to-be student of the University of California, Los Angeles.
To create the app the students
consolidated all the information they could find on each candidate’s policy positions. They dug through talk show interviews, videos of past debates and news websites to find a candidate’s view on a given topic if it was not easily accessible on the candidate’s website.
“The goal of the app is to be a one-stop shop to learn everything you need to know,” said Matrullo, who will be attending Georgetown University in the fall along with two other PoliTalk founders, including his twin brother, Christopher Matrullo.
In a world fraught with partisan language, the group sought to use words that wouldn’t provoke bias, said Kate Williams, a PoliTalk founder and future Yale University student.
“For example Obamacare is actually called the Affordable Care Act. If people see Obamacare that’s kind of a polarizing name to use. We had to go through really carefully and look at the wording and how to present it as well as we could to make it as unbiased as possible,” Williams said.
Math teacher Vibha Khetan advised the project and and government teacher Sheryl Berkley also helped the students develop the app.
“They took the idea of allowing people to have real facts and to have a real discussion,” said Berkley.
Principal Michael Rinaldi had even higher praise for the students when they presented to him about the app on June 14, the second to last day of school.
“I would argue that this group of high school seniors ... are probably as a group the most universally informed group of kids when it comes to our current presidential candidates in the country,” Rinaldi said.
The students have high hopes for the app’s future and plan to continue updating it as candidates release new policy proposals and the field evolves.
“It’s more than just an app. It’s a youth-based organization of political mindfulness essentially,” said Matrullo.