UPDATE: Lincoln Park's Mock Trial team is now headed to the State Championship in Harrisburg, after winning the Region 2 Championship on Tuesday night.
The team will advance to the Pennsylvania State Mock Trial Championship in Harrisburg on March 28-29 to compete among the top 14 teams in the state.
ORIGINAL STORY:
The verdict is in: Lincoln Park’s Pre-Law Mock Trial Team has captured its first District 1 Championship.
LP’s Mock Trial Team emerged victorious over Seneca Valley Tuesday at the Beaver County Courthouse, walking away with the crown for District 1. The district includes teams from Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, and Lawrence Counties.
The team is made up of Pre-Law and the Arts majors at Lincoln Park. They will advance to the Region 2 final on March 11. A win there would send them to the PA State Mock Trial Championship.
Pre-Law and the Arts director Mia Frank, a Pennsylvania licensed attorney who coached the winning squad, said, “Mock Trial is a great competition, but more than that, it fosters in students their powers of public speaking, critical thinking, and teamwork--skills that shape them into leaders and communicators.”
For senior pre-law major Keenan Kerr, who’s in his third year on the team, the most tense moment in Tuesday’s competition came when he realized that some of the evidence his team had been presented with was outdated.
“I had to think on my feet and change our line of questioning,” Kerr said.
Kerr and his teammates successfully defended a client accused of stealing a necklace from a time capsule, in front of a jury made up of attorneys.
A senior from Monaca, Kerr remembers his early days in the Pre-Law Department at LP, watching older members of the school’s Mock Trial Team.
“You just think, ‘That could never be me,’” Kerr said. “So this is humbling.”
The Pennsylvania Bar Association/Young Lawyers Division Mock Trial Competition includes more than 260 high school student teams from across the state. That makes it one of the largest such contests in the nation.
Kerr, who hopes to attend either West Point or the Naval Academy, and plans one day to become a lawyer, said his experiences on the Mock Trial Team have prepared him well for the future.
“I just like to do things to the best of my ability,” he said. “It’s all about testing myself and pushing myself as far as I can go.”
Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School is a tuition-free public charter school located in Midland, PA, and open to all Pennsylvania families. Students grades 7-12 are bused from more than 90 different school districts to study the arts concentration of their choice: theatre, writing and publishing, media arts, health science and the arts, music, dance, and pre-law and the arts.
For more information, visit lppacs.org or contact: admissions@lppacs.org
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