As support for public education wanes, the state of California continues to underfund large, urban, public schools that serve primarily low-income youth of color. Students who are frustrated by the quality of their education and by the stress of their personal lives often respond to these conditions by taking their feelings of dissatisfaction out on each other. This can contribute to a school culture of blame, individualism and isolation - where students aren't given sufficient opportunities to partner in the leadership of the school and feel even more disconnected or checked out from their education. While there are good people and great efforts that work on every high school campus, hundreds of students continue to disappear each year.?
So what will it take to turn it around? The answer is all about scale – our youth leadership and organizing strategies allow us to partner with schools to dramatically increase the number of youth leadership opportunities in the classroom, on-and-off campus, and district-wide, to engage not just a self-selected few, but hundreds of students in efforts to transform the collective culture so that everyone succeeds!
A few years back we co-founded a student coalition called ODB (Organize Da Bay) with Youth Together that won a Meaningful Student Engagement policy in the Oakland school district to strengthen student leadership. One of the proposed solutions in the policy would require Student Council members to be elected (and not appointed) so that they could become true ‘representatives’ of the student body. And then we realized…very few students vote in school elections. For our policy victory to be effective, we need to find ways to change the culture on campus from non-participation to full participation – where the majority of the student body is active, votes, and can hold their representatives accountable to their needs. Through our youth membership work, we are doing just that - building an informed and engaged base of students that can motivate the broader student body to become active in school change efforts.
