On Dec. 5, 2022, the Lewiston High School (LHS) Mock Trial Team won the state championship.

The finals competition took place in Augusta and was presided over by the chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. Over the last five years, the LHS team has competed in the finals three times and won two state championships.

The high schools competing in the 2022 state tournament included Kennebunk, Cape Elizabeth and Brunswick, among many others, which, according to rankings published by U.S. News, are the second, fourth and 12th best public high schools in Maine, as well as Cheverus, which is ranked by the same publication as a top 10 private high school in Maine.

In comparison, U.S. News ranks Lewiston High below the top 50.

How can the LHS team be competing against the “best” high schools in Maine in a rigorous academic competition and beating them? The answer is not complicated but well- guarded: Lewiston kids are as bright as the brightest kids in much more affluent communities with “better” schools, and they work harder than the others.

The mock trial competition attracts the best and brightest kids in every school. We expect students to author and deliver articulate and persuasive five-minute opening and closing statements in a mock criminal trial to a room full of people, without using notes. We expect student attorneys to craft and conduct direct and cross examinations of witnesses and argue the fine points of the rules of evidence with actual Maine judges. And we expect student witnesses to memorize all the relevant facts of the case and present compelling and credible performances as people other than themselves.

It is a competition not for the faint of heart. It attracts students who want to challenge themselves.

The program creates students who are self-assured, organized, focused, disciplined, hardworking and persuasive. In other words, it creates successful adults.

The Lewiston program is led by Michelle Crowley, its teacher/coach, who is a LHS graduate and a former member of its mock trial team. She has an absolute commitment to excellence and student success, and she devotes evenings and weekends to ensure her team is well coached and prepared.

Crowley is assisted by volunteer attorney coaches as well as former students, all of whom are inspired by her example. She is an educator who changes lives for the better.

In May, the LHS team will travel to Little Rock, Arkansas, to compete nationally. The Lewiston School Committee, to its credit, has voted unanimously to defray the greater portion of those expenses. Naturally, the kids will raise the rest in a GoFundMe campaign, as we do not live in a community where most parents can write checks for airfare, hotels and meals.

We all know that Lewiston has an image problem. We hear a great deal about shootings, drug busts and homelessness. But we hear very little about how our high school kids are taking on all comers in a statewide academic competition and coming out on top.

Others will not recognize our excellence if we fail to do so ourselves. We should be shouting success such as this from the rooftops. But when I look at the Facebook pages and the websites of the city of Lewiston, its school department and the chamber of commerce, I find scant, if any, mention.

There are few things we can do as a community to better correct our image than to recognize, applaud and celebrate those students who demonstrate that Lewiston’s public schools are producing graduates who can compete with, and outperform, the best students in all of Maine.

Ron Lebel of Auburn retired in 2020 after a 46-year career as a trial lawyer in Maine. He has been involved in the state high school mock trial program for more than 15 years, previously as a judge and now as one of the attorney coaches of the Lewiston High School team.