Natalie Morel

Students listen to Mr. Jeff Fry’s Street Law lesson in class.

After five periods of teaching government classes in the morning, Social Studies teacher Jason Milczewski teaches something a little bit different during his sixth-period class: Street Law. This is Milczewski’s first year instructing the class, and he uses speakers and current events to move it along, helping his students better understand the material. 

Revere High School has offered a Street Law class for over twenty years. Social Studies teacher Jeff Fry was the only teacher with the class in recent years, but due to scheduling conflicts, Milczewski also started teaching the class this year. 

Milczewski also teaches RHS’s AP and College Credit Plus (CCP) government classes. Although Street Law discusses similar topics as his government classes, Milczewski says there are still a lot of differences. Street Law covers more specific aspects about US law than his government classes do. He explained some of the topics that Street Law discusses. 

“It’s the study of practical and constitutional law, so it’s the study of things kids need to know like criminal law, traffic law, school law, parental law,” Milczewski said. 

Street Law has a long history at RHS that is different from most classes. The course was created by two teachers who no longer teach at RHS, and it was initially sponsored by the Akron Bar Association; Fry talked about how the course came to be.

“Mr. [Jed] McKnight and Mrs. [Ellen] Friery . . . started this class way back around 2000. And the class was set up and designed by the Akron Bar Association, and they provided the textbooks to all the schools around that wanted to teach the class. . . . Then, over time, the Akron Bar Association stopped supporting the class and the program, but Revere kept it,” Fry said.

Fry explained that since the Akron Bar Association no longer sponsors the class, RHS is one of the only schools that still offers Street Law.

The Akron Bar Association also used to provide speakers to come to Street Law classes. Fry thought that the speakers were a great addition to the class, so without the support of the Akron Bar Association, he had to find a way to invite speakers to come to talk to his students. Milczewski explained how they find the speakers now, without the extra support. 

“We find kids [with] parents [who] are in law enforcement; we ask them to speak. [Officer] Dressler is here every day, obviously. And two people from the juvenile court contacted us, and said they’d like to speak in our classes. We’ve also gotten some speakers from Futures Day. If there’s law enforcement, we’ll go ask them,” Milczewski said. 

With these tactics, Fry and Milczewski get many speakers to come into their classrooms. Milczewski listed all of the speakers he has hosted this year. 

“So far this year, we’ve had a US Marshall, so we’ve had law enforcement. We had Officer Dressler, so law enforcement. We just had a litigator who was a lawyer who did corporate law, and then we had two people from the juvenile court come in and do juvenile law, so it’s pretty spread out,” Milczewski said. 

One of the most accessible speakers for Milczewski and Fry to contact is Revere’s student resource officer, Scott Dressler, who has spoken to Street Law classes for seven years now and has come and talked to both Fry and Milczewski’s class twice this semester. He explained what he usually talks to the classes about. 

“Usually [I talk about] current events, anything that was going on in the news. When I do the street law classes I like to talk about search and seizures, DUIs, OVI’s. [I address] any questions they have with the law, like the actual law enforcement, [the] police side of it,” Dressler said. 

Dressler explained that the students lead the discussion when he comes into the classes and speaks to them. When he goes into a class, he plans to answer any questions they have. 

“[The students] dictate how it goes. They ask the questions. And then there’s certain points, especially with Mr. Fry, because I’ve been doing his [class] longer, when they discuss things prior he’ll write on the board [to] remember to ask Officer Dressler about this and that,” Dressler said. 

Evie Brackett, a junior in Milczewski’s class, thinks that the speakers are essential to her understanding of the material in the class. She said that she found Dressler especially informative and that she utilized the opportunity to ask him questions. 

“Officer Dressler was probably my favorite. He’s very interactive with the people in the class. He wanted us to ask a bunch of questions. I probably asked like five to ten questions,” Brackett said. 

Brackett also talked about how Milczewski will go back to the points that speakers make when they come in when he is teaching content from their textbooks. 

“We reference a lot of the stuff we talk about with the speakers to stuff we actually learn in current events or just in the notes that we take,” Brackett said. 

Another aspect of the class that strays from the textbook is Fry and Milczewski’s incorporation of current events. Milczewski explained that in his class, he uses current events in his teachings almost every day, but on Fridays, he assigns students to find one on their own. He said that although the class does not focus on laws geared towards students, his students usually choose current events about school-based laws. Milczewski also explained that the recent events helped the class go more in-depth into the curriculum. 

“We just did one today about a kid who’s suing a school in Texas because they have a policy against long hair. That’s a very Street Law topic, but it’s not something that you would have in a normal class. So we try and find things that are very specific to students’ rights [and] law,” Milczewski said. 

Milczewski listed a few more of the positives that the current events have on his class. He says that they help not only students but also himself read into local news stories. He tries to get students to choose current events that happen in the Akron area. 

“One thing I noticed is that our students, and I think it’s me too, maybe it’s a sign of the times, we’re not very good at looking up local stories. We’re really good at national things—things on Instagram, TikTok—but very few students, or me even, go to the Plain Dealer or Ohio.com, which is the Beacon Journal. So we really try to focus on local law enforcement stories, things that happen in our local area,” Milczewski said. 

With the speakers and current events, Fry and Milczewski use unconventional techniques to help their students better understand the Street Law material. Fry reiterated the purpose of the speakers and current events. 

“The goal is to teach a lot of hands-on, current stuff that maybe you can’t get into in your government classes because you don’t have time. This is more of a hands-on [class], and then we get people from the outside to come in and supplement a lot of what we do,” Fry said. 

Fry and Milczewski’s classes will soon take their final exams, and both will have new students next semester. The two will continue to implement current events and invite speakers into their classrooms, helping their students better understand the government around them.