A student-led civics project, localized to your town. All 351 of them.

Start here

Type in your town. Your students get the local half already done.

Open any community and find its civics action page. It names the exact body that decides a given issue, the lever state law gives an ordinary resident to put something in front of that body, and the phone number to call to get started.

Finding the body that can actually say yes is the step where projects stall. On this site it is already done, for the student’s own town, in language a sixteen year old can use the same afternoon.

See your town’s civics action page

In the classroom

Five steps from a website to a real student action.

1. Open your community’s edition. Every one of the 351 cities and towns has a guide to its own government, schools, legislators, history, and civic life.
2. Let each student choose an issue they actually care about. Specific and local beats broad. A crosswalk by the school is workable. Fixing the economy is not.
3. Find the body that decides it. The School Committee, the Select Board or council, or the student’s State Representative and Senator. The town guide names each one and how to reach them.
4. Open the civics action page for the exact lever. In a town that runs on town meeting, state law lets ten registered voters put an article on the annual warrant. In a council city, the route is the committee and public comment. The page hands the student the Town Clerk’s number and the two questions to ask.
5. Students take the action, document it, and reflect. The project was theirs from the first choice to the last word. You guided. They led.

What’s inside

What every community edition holds.

• Government. Who runs the town day to day, who holds the budget, and how a decision actually gets made.
• Schools. The School Committee, the superintendent, and enrollment and outcomes drawn from the state’s own data.
• Legislators. The student’s State Representative, State Senator, and congressional delegation, with how to reach each one.
• History. How the community became what it is, told honestly, including the hard chapters.
• Demographics. Who lives here now, from the Census and state datasets, with every figure carrying its source.
• Civic life. Elections, participation, and the civics action page that turns all of it into something a student can do.

For the assignment

A starting rubric you can adapt.

This is a starting point for your own gradebook, not a required form. It is built so a group project still earns each student an individual grade. DESE publishes a Civics Project Guidebook but no rubric, so the levels below are ours to offer and yours to change.

Four levels, twenty points. Weight the rows however your department weights them.

The action row is the one worth protecting. State guidance is explicit that success is the process, not the outcome, so a student whose petition fails can still score at the top of this rubric.

For the student

The one page a student fills in before they act.

Print this, or copy it into a doc and share it. A student who can answer these seven questions has a project. A student who stalls on question four has found the exact place this site was built to help.

Your town’s civic action page answers questions four and five for you. That is the whole reason it exists.

Across a term

A calendar you can drop onto a school year.

The law asks for one project per student, not one project per lesson. This is six weeks of class time spread across a year, which is how most departments actually run it: pick the issue while local government is in budget season, act in the spring when boards are voting.

• September and October, find the issue. Students open their own town’s pages and list three things they would change. Narrow to one. This is also when a class can watch a real meeting, because most boards resume a full schedule in the autumn.
• November, research. Three sourced facts each, from government data and official records. Budget documents land in this window in many communities, which makes the money visible.
• December and January, find the decision maker. The single hardest step, and the one the town pages already answer. Students name the body, the lever, and the date that lever opens.
• February and March, draft and rehearse. Write the letter, the petition, or the two minutes of public comment. Read it aloud to the class first. Town meeting season and municipal budget hearings fall here.
• April, act. Send it, call, attend, or speak. Record what happened, including silence, which is a result and worth saying so.
• May, reflect and show. Each student presents their own part. This is the step that turns a group project into individual grades.

Nothing here is required by the state. The statute sets the requirement. The calendar is yours.

Worked examples

What a finished project actually looks like.

DESE keeps a library of real student work, and it is the most useful thing on the state’s site for a teacher who wants to see the finish line before starting. Three projects from it, described by school rather than by student, because DESE publishes students by first name and last initial and we go no further than that.

• A mural, and a student who changed their mind. An eighth grader researched a Native American mural in the Natick post office, met the interim town administrator and a former Select Board member, and ended up arguing against their own opening position. They had wanted the mural removed. They proposed a contextualizing plaque and a new memorial painted by local high school students instead, published a letter to the editor in the MetroWest Daily News, and asked the town to vote on three options. The change of mind is the part worth showing a class.
• A survey that became a proposal. Eighth graders at Manchester Essex Regional Middle School surveyed their peers on how well the school covered LGBTQ+ topics, found most classmates rated it at the bottom of the scale, built a curriculum proposal for the elementary school, and presented it to the district school committee at a public meeting.
• A ban, argued honestly. Beverly High School students researched MassDEP rules and their city’s composting program and proposed a city-wide ban on polystyrene food containers. They wrote the case against their own proposal too, including that restaurants were having a hard time and might not afford the alternatives. That is what the non-partisan standard looks like in practice.

For your department head

Where this sits in the 2018 Framework.

Start with the thing most alignment charts get wrong. The Massachusetts History and Social Science Framework was adopted in 2018, the same year as the civics law, and it contains no standard that says “civics project”. There is no topic number to point at, because the Framework encodes the content and the practices, and Chapter 296 encodes the assignment. Anyone who hands you a single code for the project itself has invented it.

What does exist is a clean map, and DESE uses it too. The Guidebook aligns the project to the Standards for History and Social Science Practice, numbered 1 to 7. Practice Standard 7 is the project in one line:

“Determine next steps and take informed action, as appropriate.”

Standards for History and Social Science Practice, standard 7, 2018 Framework, page 24.

For content, two courses carry this work, and the codes are the Framework’s own:

• Grade 8, United States and Massachusetts Government and Civic Life. Topics run 8.T1 through 8.T7: the philosophical foundations of the political system, the development of the United States government, the institutions of that government, the rights and responsibilities of citizens, the Constitution and Supreme Court decisions, the structure of Massachusetts state and local government, and freedom of the press and media literacy.
• High school elective, United States Government and Politics. Topics run T1 through T5. Note that the electives use bare topic numbers with no course prefix, so cite the course by name alongside the number.

Two standards do most of the work if you are asked to evidence this site specifically. The first is 8.T6, standard 10, which is close to a description of what every community edition on this site contains:

“Explain the major components of local government in Massachusetts, including the roles and functions of mayors, city councils, and school committees in cities; town managers, select boards, representative and open town meetings and school committees, in towns, and courts and sheriff’s departments in counties.”

2018 Framework, Grade 8, Topic 6, standard 10.

The second is standard 8 of Topic 4 in the high school United States Government and Politics course, which reads almost like a project brief: identify a significant public policy issue in the community with other students, gather information, fairly evaluate competing points of view, seek consensus or compromise, examine ways of participating in the decision, and produce a position paper or presentation on how the issue may be resolved.

Checked against the 2018 Framework in July 2026. If DESE revises it, this mapping needs rechecking, and we would rather you know that than trust a code we never looked up.

Every student

Built to include every student, safely.

• The individual option is in the law. Any student who prefers not to join a group or class project may complete an individual civics project, with the principal’s approval. No student is left without a path.
• Contact with officials uses verified addresses. Students reach public offices, never personal accounts. Every legislator address on this site is verified and maintained in one record covering all 351 cities and towns. We publish no municipal email addresses, because those are the ones we cannot stand behind: the civics action page gives the office, the town’s own roster link, and the Clerk’s phone number, and the student calls and asks. Each letter tells the student what they need to share and what is theirs to decide.
• It works on a phone, in more than one language. The founding documents are offered in Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, and French, alongside a plain-language English text, so the project opens a door for multilingual learners rather than a wall.

What the law asks

You are required to assign this. Here is the exact language.

Chapter 296 of the Acts of 2018, An Act to promote and enhance civic engagement, added the requirement to the General Laws. The words are more specific than most people remember:

“Each public school serving students in the eighth grade and each public high school shall provide not less than 1 student-led, non-partisan civics project for each student.”

Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 71, Section 2. Added by Chapter 296 of the Acts of 2018 and in effect for students beginning the 2020 school year.

Student-led. Non-partisan. One per student. The law also protects choice: any student may complete an individual project with the principal’s approval. The standard is not the obstacle. The obstacle is that a project about a real issue needs a student to find the body that can act on it, and that is the step this site is built around.

This site is not affiliated with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and does not claim to be. For the assignment structure itself, the state’s own materials are the right place to start:

We are not DESE and we do not speak for it. The 2018 Framework contains no civics-project standard to claim alignment to, so we do not claim one. What we can show you is the real map, quoted with page numbers, in Where this sits in the 2018 Framework. If your department needs a standard we have not covered there, tell us which one and we will point you to the pages that carry it.