Students Organize Senate

School administrators would start receiving more proposals from student leaders under a plan for a new legislative body that high schoolers are putting together.

Nico Rivera and Lihame Arouna, the school board’s two non-voting student representatives, pitched that idea for a ​“student senate” to members of the City-Wide Student Council at a Thursday meeting at Metropolitan Business Academy.

That smaller body would meet on their own time, probably twice a month, to research topics and draft policy to send to the Board of Education.

Rivera said he’s looking for ​“loyal and responsible students ready to commit themselves to empowering students’ rights and voices.”

To apply by next week, they need a short recommendation from the principal or student council advisor, and they need to answer three short questions about why they want to join, what strengths they would bring, and what topic they would like to focus on.

The senate, which will have about 11 members, would visit schools, conduct surveys, give presentations and advise student councils. They’ll essentially act as a go-between for the larger student council to create actual proposals for the student representatives to introduce at school board meetings.

“They’ll see what the problems are and see what we can do,” Rivera explained. ​“They’ll take what they want from the City-Wide Student Council and basically help do all the legwork.”

Every month, dozens of student leaders get together for City-Wide Student Council meetings, where they hear about the school board’s latest debates, review climate survey data, and brainstorm how to increase student engagement.

But three hours later, by the time they head back to their high schools on the bus, some students say they feel like they didn’t accomplish anything.

“We have open forums, which are great, but if all we do is open forums, it’s just a circular discussion. We all kind of start to agree on something, and then it just ends,” Thomas Nardini, a senior at Engineering & Science University Magnet School, said at a recent meeting. ​“I think maybe if we implemented some sort of way of proposing things officially — people always talk about Robert’s Rules of Order — those forums could actually lead to something.”

Rivera argued that a student senate would allow a smaller group of volunteers to have more time to really hammer out their ideas for what changes they want to see inside city schools.

Some student council members at Thursday’s meeting said they were skeptical of the idea.

Why couldn’t the student council just become more organized? one asked. And what’s the point of having two student representatives on the Board of Education if they weren’t doing this already? another asked.

Rivera argued that it would be easier to pass policies if the board members knew they were backed up a coalition of all the city’s high schools, rather than just the pet projects of the two student representatives.

“More voices means more power. When we rally for Black Lives Matter or for Mario [Aguilar, the Wilbur Cross student detained by ICE], more people came out and more people made a difference,” he said. ​“Me and [Arouna] can only do so much. We can keep talking until we have no voice left. The more people we have, the more power we have.”

Arouna said that the senate wouldn’t be ​“gatekeepers,” but would instead help to put more kids in power, ​“to get their voice heard and help other students out.”

Leslie Blatteau, a social studies teacher at Metropolitan Business Academy, agreed that the senate would function as ​“a link.”

“Because we have a big group of people coming here during the school day, we’re sort of limited here,” she said. ​“Some of these people would meet up twice a month, on their own time, to do research and lobbying, talking with the Board of Ed and City Hall.”

Blatteau added that the City-Wide Student Council might want to eventually write up its own bylaws that could clearly divvy up the responsibilities, explaining the purpose and process for each body to do its work.

Once it’s up and running, likely next month, the student senate will be focusing on a number of different topics that the City-Wide Student Council has brought up this year.

They’re going to start by trying to make the district’s high schools feel more welcoming through a new program called Students That Achieve Respect, or STAR, that will come up with school-specific ways for kids to connect outside of class. They’re hoping to see a decrease in bullying and fights, as a result.

They’re also going to work on adding recycling to school cafeterias, rolling out ethnic studies classes to high schools, and studying whether schools need metal detectors.