Committee for Student Voice

In the Spring of 2019, three students went to Principal Garon Smail with a proposal. They noticed a dearth of student voice in their school and wanted to form a group of students to capture student opinion and increase student civic participation. They called this group the Committee for Student Voice. This is a small testimonial from one of the founding members, Sam Powers, regarding the first meeting of this group with the student body.

We were pretty sure how our presentation to the student body would go. We would ask for what they thought our school could improve upon and they would respond with the usual issues: Proficiency-based Grading, ARE Time Scheduling, and Greensheets.

To understand student opinion, we used a data representation tool known as a word cloud where the more frequent responses become larger. We prompted our peers with the question, "What do you think our school could improve upon?"

The word cloud began with the standard responses. As we expected, entrances like "ARE", "Greensheets", and "Grading" were quickly populating the presentation tool. But, one response we did not expect was getting quite large: "Urinal-Dividers". My fellow presenters and I were struggling to understand why "Urinal-Dividers" was rivaling what we perceived were the school’s more important issues.

We slowed the presentation and digested the results. For clarification, we asked our peers why they felt like "Urinal-Dividers" was an issue that needed to be brought to the attention of the Committee for Student Voice. A student explained with eloquence and honesty that he felt uncomfortable in the bathroom because there were no urinal dividers in between the urinals to give some semblance of privacy while peeing standing up.

A small group of students trying to capture the opinions of the student body, in all of our contemplation about the school’s issues, had never thought about the simple issue of bathroom privacy. This is why the Committee for Student Voice exists. After brainstorming possible avenues for change, after thinking about which issues our committee should tackle, we had never stopped to think about such a simple and easily-solvable problem.

The Committee for Student Voice wants to know what our peers are thinking. We want to understand the broad range of experiences and opinions of our students to then better inform our administration and school board.

Today, it’s urinal dividers. Tomorrow, who knows? That is what’s so exciting about the Committee for Student Voice Initiative. With increased student civic participation, we can bring to the attention of the administration and the school board diverse issues that professional educators or even a small group of engaged students could not have thought of.