Students As Education Partners

FOCUS

Students as education partners

By Emanuelle Sippy and Rachel Belin

Categories: Continuous improvement, Data

February 2020

Vol 41, No. 1

From the Little Rock Nine and the Children’s Crusaders during the civil rights movement to today’s Dreamers and organizers of the March for Our Lives, young people have long been on the front lines of pushing for systemic change. The Prichard Committee Student Voice Team, consisting of 100 self-selected students from across Kentucky, works in that tradition to improve schools and society. The Student Voice Team is an extension of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, an organization that has been mobilizing citizens to improve education in Kentucky for nearly 40 years. At its core, we believe that students can bring enormous added value in making schools better. We also believe that, along with teachers, young people on the front lines of our classrooms are

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Authors

Emanuelle Sippy and Rachel Belin

Emanuelle Sippy (eswsippy@gmail.com) is a junior at Henry Clay High School in Lexington, Kentucky, and co-director of the Prichard Committee Student Voice Team. Rachel Belin (rbelin@prichardcommittee.org) is co-director of the Prichard Committee Student Voice Team.

About the student voice team

The Student Voice Team includes 100 students from across the state of Kentucky, but we don’t speak just for ourselves. Elevating meaningful student voice demands making space for all students to have a role in decision-making, not just a selected few. We are focused on equity, so one of the most important questions we continually ask ourselves and others to consider is: What obligation do I have to students in my world who may be least heard in it?

Because our self-selection process tends to draw students who are successful in school, we know our members cannot represent fully the Kentucky student experience. To do so, we reach out to other students from all backgrounds primarily in the form of student-to-student interviews and roundtables.

We are also intentional about amplifying the voices of students who are least heard by sharing their stories on a range of platforms from social media and blogging to op-eds, policy reports, professional learning, and speaking engagements. We aim not to tell the stories of students for them but to encourage them to tell their own, whether we’re talking with a handful of African American students about race in a predominantly white, rural school; visiting students at a school for the deaf to talk about the challenges of communicating with teachers who are not native sign language speakers; or listening to students in one of the most underresourced school districts speak to their experience of limited extracurricular opportunities.