The board of education makes decisions that impact students in many ways. However, students aren’t given much say in what those decisions are.
Kansas state Representative Nikki McDonald proposed a bill this year that would require each local school district to include a student representative. The student would be allowed to attend BOE meetings and express the opinions of their peers directly to the board.
“I think it’s really important that we have a chance for students to give input and to empower them a little bit,” she said. “It’s their future that we’re molding. And a lot of times kids, especially in this age of technology, a lot of times kids have a lot to teach us. I think that there’s a lot more buy-in when you can be a part of the process, right? And so we can teach kids the reason for some of the decisions we make and maybe they can question us to help us think in different ways that we hadn’t considered before.”
Students we spoke to say that this bill would give them a way to voice their opinions about their education.
“It’s very important to not just get an adult’s point of view but also a kid’s, like myself, point of view. Because it just gives us a voice, it just gives us an opinion, you know? It gets our word out there because, obviously, we’re important too. We make the school, a school,” Maxine Espino (12) said.
Some districts outside of Kansas already have a similar law in place.
“I did have a conversation with Blue Valley’s superintendent, and she recently moved here from Wyoming, and she said that she loves my bill. And then in Wyoming they do this a lot, and she thought it was a really great addition,” McDonald said.
McDonald says she’s not hopeful her bill will actually get a hearing this year, but she says there’s still a possibility she may submit it again in a future session,
“As a democrat in the super minority, it’s very, very hard for us to get our bills heard,” McDonald said. “So there’s some partisan drama and politics involved as well, but. You know, I would like to have some more conversations, not just with my own school board members, but with board members across the state.”
