Chelsea Teacher Selected for Summer Law Program

Chelsea High School history teacher Tyler Santoro was one of 60 teachers across the country to be selected for Street Law’s annual summer program. Street Law is an organization that seeks to empower teachers to educate on history, civics and law to create more informed students.

Santoro will participate in the program this coming June, which includes a trip to DC and a variety of opportunities for teachers to gain direct knowledge of federal law to bring back to their classrooms.

“We’re able to go to DC for five days and meet with legal experts, other teachers, people from the Supreme Court, historical society, people from Street Law, and just talk about different ways of teaching law,” he said. “We’ll go through some actual experiences that we could try in the classroom. We also get the opportunity to go visit the Capitol building, and then, if the timing allows, we might actually be able to sit in the Supreme Court when they’re announcing some decisions from some cases.”

Santoro recently began offering a practical law elective at CHS for students to become engaged with government and law as they prepare to participate in elections and legal matters directly.

“Considering how complicated and complex the legal system is, if we can maybe simplify it in a way that’s a little bit more palatable for 15-18-year-old kids, I think we’re doing them a complete disservice if we don’t do that,” he said. “They are becoming adults that are entering the world where they could be involved in the legal system, they could be someone that serves on a jury if they get selected for jury duty. So just understanding how the legal system works and functions and affects their day-to-day life, I think personally, is super important.”

Santoro is looking forward to how this opportunity will allow him to better serve his students.

“I’m really mainly just looking for new and more exciting ways to teach about law, because it is such a complex and dense topic, it can be a little dry and maybe boring sometimes,” he said. “Just fun and exciting ways to engage my students with the material is what I’m hoping will be my big takeaway from this experience.”