OPINION: Putting students on school boards treats young people as participants in their own democracy, but only if adults listen to them

“Public school is the first place most Americans meet democracy. It is also, for almost all of them, the last place they experience it without a vote. School boards are elected by adults, staffed by adults and run for adults. They make decisions every week about buildings full of young people who get no say. That is starting to change, and the change is not going well in some places. Consider what happened last month in Washington County, Tennessee. A student at David Crockett High School had just questioned her superintendent about middle school consolidation, career and technical education and graduation goals when board member Keith Ervin, several decades her senior, pulled her against him on camera . “God, you’re hot,” he said. “Do you know that?” The superintendent and the board chair laughed. Nobody intervened. The meeting moved on. Days later, the board unanimously voted to censure Ervin, the second time he has been censured for misconduct toward students. He has not resigned. Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education . Tennessee began requiring most districts to seat student members on school boards in an advisory, nonvoting capacity this year. The student who asked those questions was doing exactly what the role was designed to do. The adults around her were not fulfilling their roles. This is what it looks like when a country adds young people to rooms where decisions get made without first preparing the adults in those rooms to share power. Student school board members aren’t new. In 1975, a sixteen-year-old named Anthony Arend was among the first student school board members with voting rights in the country, seated in Maryland’s Anne Arundel County Public Schools after lobbying state legislators himself . For decades, the practice spread slowly. That is changing fast. Currently, more than 33 U.S. states have laws that allow boards to include student members. As my colleagues and I detailed last year, 14 percent of the 495 largest U.S. school districts have students on school boards, and more than 400 students are currently serving on state advisory councils or boards of education. According to an informal tally kept by the National Student Board Member Association , which one of us co-founded, roughly 1,500 student members now serve on school boards, representing more than 20 million students. New York passed a law in 2024 requiring a student position on every school board with a high school. Minnesota , Nebraska and Vermont have introduced similar legislation. Related: STUDENT VOICE: School boards are a critical piece of democracy. That’s why students must be on them This should be quiet good news for anyone worried about American democracy. Granting seats to students treats young people as participants in their own governance, not just its subjects. Self-government must be practiced somewhere, and the school district — the civic institution young people already know best — is a reasonable place to start. In some districts, student members are treated as colleagues. In others, as props or, worse, as targets. When a student member of Maryland’s Howard County Board of Education cast a deciding vote on pandemic school closures in 2020, the response was online harassment , a bill to gut the position and a federal lawsuit . He kept his seat. The lesson: When a student’s voice carries real weight, adults push back. In Alaska’s Mat-Su Borough, a student representative named Ben Kolendo pressed colleagues on how they were hand-picking a library committee. The board 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, Florida, board members debated eliminating their student delegate position due to an Islamophobic social media campaign harassing the student board member. The student member disagreed : “As the student representative who was attacked, I do not believe that 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 backlash is not the only story. Mac Duis of the University of Lynchburg studied 68 recorded school board meetings across 12 Virginia districts — six with student members, six without. Boards with a student at the table had fewer confrontational exchanges and more civil ones. Why does student presence on school boards sometimes provoke a backlash and other times promote civility? We believe it is not only about the student, but also the conditions under which that student exercises power. Too many school boards add students without supporting the role. Related: COLUMN: How student school board members are driving climate action Go back to Tennessee. The Washington County board that laughed has four student members on paper . Only one sits on the dais at a time, in an advisory, unpaid, nonvoting role, appointed by the principal, with no required training. Districts serious about this role know what it requires: student elections, yearlong terms of office, district-funded training, voting power and protections for minors sharing a dais with adults twice their age. As the Washington County student representative argued , districts with student representatives must adopt policies that require board members to be trained in “sexual assault and appropriate conduct.” The stakes are bigger than any single district. For most Americans, the school board is the last democratic institution they watch up close before losing interest entirely. If the only lesson we teach young people is that adults will laugh when one of them gets hit on, or that the student vote will be stripped as soon as a student asks a hard question, they will draw the obvious conclusion and stop participating. Student members will not fix American school governance. But early research suggests that boards that include a student can 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 past time to ask them to help run the institution. If school districts aren’t willing to give student board members real power, they should not create these positions at all. Otherwise, they risk leaving young people even less confident in the democracy we are about to inherit. A nonvoting seat rotated monthly and handed out by the superintendent is not representation. It is a photo op. 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 . This story about students on school boards was produced by The Hechinger Report , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter . The post OPINION: Putting students on school boards treats young people as participants in their own democracy, but only if adults listen to them appeared first on The Hechinger Report .

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