2022-05-23 – The Atchison Globe reports a local elementary school student entered into a debate by essay on the topic of the metric system in a national magazine for schools, Scholastic News.

The article in the Globe:

EFFINGHAM – An Atchison County Elementary School pupil was one of the featured debaters in the “DEBATE IT” section published in a recent edition of Scholastic News.

James Gaddis, a rural Effingham resident, expressed his view in the “Should the U.S. switch to the Metric System?”

Scholastic News is a weekly classroom magazine mostly distributed to several million intermediate school-aged youngsters each week to engage students in current events, nonfiction and social studies.

The article explains the U.S. is only one of three countries to utilize the imperial system of measurement, like cups, ounces, pounds, inches, feet and miles.

In comparison most other countries have adopted the Metric system and its units of meters, centimeters, liters and grams.

Gaddis and the other the opposing debater, Jazzmin G. Garcia, a California resident, were each required to write no less than two facts in support of their opinions featured in their respective opinions expressed in the argument essays.

Gaddis, 11, wrote the article while a fifth-grader. Gaddis is preparing to enter the sixth-grade at ACCES for the 2022-23 schoolyear.

Gaddis kicked off his stance with a referred to the old adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and expressed his belief the current system continues to work fine and to abolish or make changes would be costly and cause difficulties. Gaddis projected the change would impact all the mile marker and weight limit signage as well as food labels across the United States. He estimated the changes would cost billions.

Garcia opined measurements should globally be of a universal system because it is too confusing to convert from one system to another; the U.S. military, scientists and medical professionals utilize the metric system because it’s simpler and more exact.