 At Audiology Associates of Prestonsburg, you can live your life the way you want and find the freedom of better hearing. With 40 years of being in the hearing care industry, you'll experience patient care that is specific to you with exceptional follow-up care that ensures your hearing and balance needs are being met. Audiology Associates at 1428 Northlake Drive in Prestonsburg. On Thursday, April 27th, the National Civics Bee was hosted at the Mountain Arts Center. Sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students from all over the state gathered to compete with each other in front of a board of guest judges. The goal of the Civics Bee is to determine who is the best at using civics to solve problems in their community. So today we're at the Mountain Arts Center. We've got 20 students all across Eastern Kentucky from 24 Eastern Kentucky counties representing nine high schools, sorry middle schools, six, seven, and eighth grade students. 20 students here to learn about civics. We've got a live quiz getting ready to happen. So they're going through two rounds. 20 students become five students. We're going to feed them real well. Then after the break, we'll have a third round. And the students have, they've all written an essay to be here about a problem that civics can solve and how they're going to use civics to solve that problem. And so we've got a panel of judges. They're going to ask them some questions and we're going to narrow those five students down to the top three. And from there, those three students go on to a state competition against the other five regions across Kentucky. The Chamber of Commerce hopes to see the Civics Bee grow in size for next year's competition. The students on stage this year have worked diligently to be where they are. So this is a program by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. The Southeast Kentucky Chamber was selected to host the Eastern Kentucky region. Again, there are six regions all across Kentucky. Last year was the pilot program with a state-only competition. This year, they expanded that into local regional competitions. And we're hoping to see this grow into local, state, and national competition next year. All these students are going to do great. They've done fantastic just to be here. Any time we have an opportunity to engage our students in civics, teaching them about government, get them involved in the process, we've already won. And so today is just a fun game to see how we take those 20 students and move them on to the next level. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Nick Collum.