Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of stories about Warsaw Community Schools students who advanced to National History Day national competition June 9-13 at the University of Maryland’s campus in College Park, Md.
For the second consecutive year, Warsaw Community High School freshman Rachel Doyle is headed to the national contest for National History Day.
In 2018, her project was on “Eleanor Roosevelt and the Creation of Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
This year, the theme for NHD is “Triumph and Tragedy” and Doyle’s project is an exhibit board on “The Creation of the Polio Vaccine.”
NHD offers year-long academic programs that engage over half a million middle and high school students around the world annually in conducting original research on historical topics of interest. The largest NHD program is the NHD Contest that encourages more than half a million students around the world to conduct historical research on a topic of their choice. Students enter these projects at the local and state levels, with top students advancing to the national contest at the University of Maryland.
On Doyle’s exhibit board are a map of the world that shows the countries that had polio in 1988, and a picture of the three countries that have it now.
On the sides is background information on polio with information on how the vaccine was created. It goes into the efforts that are being made now to eradicate polio.
Doyle said the biggest thing she’s learned from her NHD project is time management. She swims on the WCHS team, so doing the project while in school and on the swim team was “hard,” she said.
As for polio, she learned it “is a noncurable disease that only has preventative methods, and there’s three different types of the disease, and it can present itself in many different ways, which is why it became so widespread in the United States in the 1950s and late ’40s.”
Doyle said the world is working to eradicate polio. “Now the entire western hemisphere has eradicated of it, and now only three countries have it – which are Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria.”
She said she chose to do a project on polio because she’s always been interested in diseases and their causes. She’s also been interested “in the medical side of things” because she comes from a medical family.
“I wanted to find a disease that wasn’t too historic like smallpox, but not as recent as Ebola. I wanted to find something right in between and I found polio and it impacted the United States heavily,” she said.
