Public school is the first place most Americans encounter democracy. It is also, for almost all of them, the last place where they experience it without a vote. School boards are elected by adults, staffed by adults, and managed by adults. They make decisions every week about buildings full of young people who have no say.
This is starting to change, and change is not going well in some places.
Consider what happened last month in Washington County, Tennessee. A student at David Crockett High School I just asked her superintendent over college consolidation, career and technical education and graduation goals when board member Keith Ervin, several decades her senior, turned her on in front of the camera.
“God, you’re hot,” he said. “You know that? »
The superintendent and board president laughed. Nobody intervened. The meeting continued. A few days later, the board of directors unanimously voted censor Ervin, the second time he was censured for misconduct toward students. He did not resign.
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Tennessee started requiring that most districts to sit this year for student members on school boards in an advisory capacity and without the right to vote. The student who asked these questions was doing exactly what his role was designed to do. The adults around her were not fulfilling their role.
This is what it looks like when a country adds young people into rooms where decisions are made without first preparing the adults in those rooms to share power.
Student members of the school board are not new. In 1975, sixteen-year-old Anthony Arend was among the first voting school board members in the country, serving in the public schools of Anne Arundel County, Maryland. after lobbying state legislators himself. For decades, this practice spread slowly. This is changing quickly.
Currently, more than 33 US states have laws which allow boards of directors to include student members. As my colleagues and I have explained, 14 percent of America’s 495 largest school districts have students on school boards, and more than 400 students currently serve on state advisory councils or school boards. According to an informal count kept by the National Association of Student Council Memberswhich one of us co-founded, approximately 1,500 student members now serve on school boards, representing more than 20 million students. New York has passed a law in 2024, requiring a student position in each school board with a secondary school. Minnesota, Nebraska And Vermont have introduced similar legislation.
Related: STUDENT VOICES: School boards are an essential element of democracy. This is why students must be on their guard
This should be good news for anyone worried about American democracy. By granting seats to students, young people are treated as participants in their own governance, and not as mere subjects. Self-governance must be practiced somewhere, and the school district – the civic institution that young people are already most familiar with – is a reasonable place to start.
In some districts, student members are treated as colleagues. In others, as props or, even worse, as targets.
When a student member of the Howard County Maryland school board voted decisively on pandemic school closures in 2020, the response was online harassmenta bill aimed at resolving the situation and a federal trial. He kept his place. The lesson: When a student’s voice carries real weight, adults push back.
In Alaska’s Mat-Su district, a student representative named Ben Kolendo was vocal about how they select a library committee. The advice stripped him of his title, his vote, and most of his speaking rights, reducing his role to a “brief report” at the start of each meeting.
Last month in Hernando County, Fla., board members discussed the elimination their position as student representative due to an Islamophobic social media campaign harassing the student council member. The student the member disagrees: “As a student representative under attack, I don’t think removing this role would do anything positive.”
These moments are stress tests, revealing how adults respond when students move from symbolic participation to actual governance.
But the backlash isn’t the only story. Mac Duis of the University of Lynchburg studied 68 registered school board meetings in 12 Virginia districts – six with student members, six without. Boards with a student at the table had fewer confrontational exchanges and more civil exchanges.
Why does the presence of students on school boards sometimes provoke negative reactions and, at other times, promote civility? We believe it is not just about the student, but also the conditions in which that student exercises power. Too many school boards are adding students without supporting this role.
Related: COLUMN: How student school board members are leading climate action
Go back to Tennessee. The Washington County Board of Commissioners who laughed four student members on paper. Only one seat on the dais at a time, in an advisory, unpaid, non-voting role, appointed by the Director, with no training required.
Districts that take this role seriously know what it requires: student elections, one-year terms, district-funded training, voting power, and protections for minors sharing a stage with adults twice their age.
As Washington County Student Representative argueddistricts with student representatives must adopt policies requiring board members to be trained on “sexual assault and appropriate conduct.”
The stakes are higher than any district. For most Americans, the school board is the last democratic institution they watch closely before losing interest altogether. If the only lesson we teach young people is that adults laugh when one of them gets hit on, or that student voting is suppressed as soon as a student asks a difficult question, they will jump to the obvious conclusion and stop participating.
Student members will not fix American school governance. But early research suggests that boards that include a student may spend less time fighting among themselves and more time talking about the students they serve.
For years, we have given young people ceremonial titles and asked them to plan dances. It is high time to ask them to participate in the functioning of the institution. If school districts are not willing to give real power to student board members, they should not create such positions at all. Otherwise, they risk leaving young people even less confident in the democracy we are about to inherit.
A non-voting seat rotated monthly and allocated by the Superintendent does not constitute representation. It’s a photo shoot.
Andrew Brennen is a third-year student at Columbia Law School and holds a master’s degree in education policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is the co-founder of the Kentucky Student Voice Team. Zachary Patterson co-founded the National Student Board Member Association after serving as a student member of the San Diego Unified School District Board of Education. He is a student at Duke University.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
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The article OPINION: Putting students on school boards treats young people as participants in their own democracy, but only if adults listen, appeared first in The Hechinger Report.
