By Eileen Oldfield, Staff Writer
As citizens nationwide turned to their televisions watching Barack Obama take the presidential oath Jan. 20, Matt Zangara had an almost-front row seat.
The Manville High School senior attended the historic inauguration with the Presidential Youth Leadership Conference, offered by the LeadAmerica foundation, standing near a lake at the National Mall during the ceremony.
”There were only a couple thousand people in front of us, so we were actually pretty close,” Matt said of attending the ceremony with the 618-person LeadAmerica delegation. “I can actually say I was there for something that is history.”
High school students selected for the program must demonstrate both academic excellence and community service to be invited to the conference. When he initially received a letter about the conference in November 2008, Matt wasn’t certain it was a legitimate program, however, research into the foundation revealed otherwise.
”I didn’t know if it was something that was for real or not,” Matt said. “I looked into the program, and found out it was something that was pretty big.”
Matt began looking for donations to reduce the conference’s approximately $3,000 cost, receiving about half the money from the Bound Brook Moose Lodge, and the remaining money from family and friends.
The six-day conference featured a tour of monuments and sites around Washington D.C.; lectures with Congressman Jeff Flake of Arizona; Mary Beth Tinker of the 1969 Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines, which established students’ First Amendment rights, and author Martin Dupuis.
The conference offers its own activities too, including seminars on current events and debate simulations and its own “inaugural ball.
”It was just an amazing time between that (attending the inauguration) and meeting all the people who were down there,” Matt said. “I got to have fun for a week.”
After returning to Manville, Matt spoke to Weston School’s third grade and Roosevelt School’s fifth graders about his experience.
”It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience to see all that stuff,” Matt said. “The inauguration itself, you can look in the books down the road, and say ‘I was there’.”

