Proud to be an American

• Whiz Kids' Name(s): Aaron Hinton, Alex Simmons and Bonnie Vigland

• Whiz Kids' School/Church/Community Center:

• Whiz Kids' Accomplishment: Three Hazelwood West Middle School eighth-grade students received awards in the Florissant Elks’ “Why I am Proud to be an American” essay contest.

• Whiz Kids' Key to Awesomeness: They were all open about their views and opinions and took being an American seriously.
  

Aaron Hinton, Alex Simmons and Bonnie Vigland discussed their 250-word essays and what it means to them to be U.S. Citizens with the (HSD) Communications Office.

“It feels good to me personally because I want to be an author,” Alex said. “I tried to zoom in on our nation as compared to other countries in what makes us lucky.

"Some countries have dictatorships, I have a great deal of pride being an American (and) I feel that my life would be a lot different and probably for the worse if I lived somewhere else.”

 Bonnie said the United States is not as bad some people and places portray it.

 “After I figured out what I was going to do, it didn’t take long to write,” she said. “A lot of people here think we have it so terrible and while we have flaws, we have a lot of good things here, too.

"People think government and religion are tied when they really are not.”

Aaron said he did not write his essay with a specific topic in mind.

 “I just wrote about my opinions on how I feel about living in America,” he said. “We are lucky to live here.

"People in third-world countries don’t have the things we do, like running water."

The contest gives students a chance to express their opinions on pride in America. Elks’ Division 2 judges, which judge seventh-grade and eighth-grade winners, chose essays based on their originality, theme development and sentence and grammar mechanics plus neatness, according to HSD.

There are four levels to the contest: local, district, state and the national contest. The students won the local lodge’s contest.