Once a year, SWOSU hosts History Day for middle school and high school students. Hosted in the Memorial Student Center Ballroom, students from the Western Region of Oklahoma showcase their projects on various topics and compete for a chance to move on to State.
K-12 schools compete based on a theme given to the whole country at the beginning of the competition. Students are then let loose to choose a topic related to the overall theme and begin working on their presentation.
“Most of themes tend to be very broad and so it allows students a great deal of leeway in choosing, but what they do have to demonstrate is how they believe that their topic that they’ve chosen relates to the current theme, that’s a key part of it,” Tenured Judge Dr. Laura Endicott said.
Judges look for a variety of criteria from how well it is presented to the quality of the information provided to one of the most important aspects, how well they connected the topic to the theme. Judges like Dr. Endicott and Dr. Sunu Kodumthara look for these specific criteria and collaborate to eventually choose who they will move onto the State competition.
“Can you demonstrate that you know your topic? How good is your research? Did you look at primary sources and secondary sources? How well do you know your topic? Because we don’t want somebody whose parent or teacher does all the research for them,” Kodumthara said. 
“You want students who know the topic well, who can answer the questions that we ask them and are confident about what they’re presenting.”
This year’s topic was “Rights and Themes from History.” Students’ projects ranged from Posters to Documentaries to Live Performances, but the majority of students chose to display their works on wood and paper posters. A few of the topics chosen by the participants included: “White by Law, Colored by Birth: How Hernandez v Texas won Mexican American Rights,” “In defiance of Hitler: Irish Women in the Resistance,” and “The Right to Play: The Integration of Pro Football.”
The ultimate goal for these students is to go to nationals in Washington D.C. and bring a trophy back to their town, but the road is long. First, they compete at regionals, where 3 teams move on. Then the winners of this move onto State in OKC, where two teams get selected to go to Nationals to compete at the University of Maryland. In D.C., they face all 50 states plus U.S. territories like Guam and Puerto Rico, an opportunity that many students only dream about.
“For a lot of students, especially students from this area, from smaller communities, the opportunity to go to Washington DC is, you know, very rewarding for them, because they’ve put in a tremendous amount of hard work on these projects, whether it’s a performance or a documentary or an exhibit or a paper or a website, they’ve worked really hard on that,” Endicott said.
This history day ended with Hayden Estrada winning first overall, presenting “The Right to Sit: Clara Luper and the Oklahoma City Sit-in Movement,” and moving on to the state competition later this May.
