Ithaca High School students Adam Saar, Grace Lim, Aitan Avgar, and Kadek Nawiana share about their activism and advocacy as student representatives to their board of education. Adam, Grace, Aitan and Kadek renew and inspire with their stories, detailing how they are elected, what their roles and responsibilities entail, and how they prepare for board meetings. They leave listeners brimming with hope for our future.
Please (seriously, you must...) take the time to see these incredible students in action, speaking to issues from our interview via the two ICSD Board Meeting Video Clips Below:
Get solutions from Schoolutions!
#solutionsfromschoolutions #schoolutionsinspires #schoolutionspodcast
Ithaca High School students Adam Saar, Grace Lim, Aitan Avgar, and Kadek Nawiana share about their activism and advocacy as student representatives to their board of education. Adam, Grace, Aitan and Kadek renew and inspire with their stories, detailing how they are elected, what their roles and responsibilities entail, and how they prepare for board meetings. They leave listeners brimming with hope for our future.
Please (seriously, you must...) take the time to see these incredible students in action, speaking to issues from our interview via the two ICSD Board Meeting Video Clips Below:
Get solutions from Schoolutions!
#solutionsfromschoolutions #schoolutionsinspires #schoolutionspodcast
Schoolutions –S1 E12: Engaged Teenagers = Hope For Our Future: Student Representatives to the Board of Education with Adam Saar, Grace Lim, Aitan Avgar & Kadek Nawiana (Part I)
[00:00:00] Olivia: Welcome to Schoolutions, where listening will leave you inspired by solutions to issues you or others you know may be struggling with in the public education system today. Hello, I am Olivia Wahl, and I am so fortunate to introduce you to my guests. A team of engaged student leaders. Welcome, guys. I'm so excited to have you.
[00:00:24] Olivia: What I'd love to do is kind of flip the script. Typically, I introduce guests, yet I feel like these students are amazing and have so much to say. So instead of my voice dominating the introduction to this episode, let's hear from them. Adam, can you kick us off? Introduce yourself to listeners.
[00:00:43] Adam: Sure. I'm Adam Sarr.
[00:00:44] Adam: I'm a..I'm a senior at Ithaca High School, and I'm in my second year as a representative to the Board of Education. I'm also the copy editor of The Tattler, which is an amazing school newspaper, and I also play soccer for Ithaca. I'm a lover of all things sports and music as well.
[00:01:01] Olivia: Can you let us know, or let listeners know, who an inspiring teacher is to you?
[00:01:06] Adam: Yeah, I think one teacher, this year at least, that's been particularly inspiring for me is my English teacher, Miss Cole, who has come back to the district after having gone to high school here many years back and has encouraged us to kind of unformulate our writing and think in many different ways about literature and all this is really made me appreciate English a lot more than previously.
[00:01:31] Olivia: Fabulous. Grace, introduce yourself to listeners.
[00:01:35] Grace: Hi, my name is Grace Lim. I am a junior at Ithaca High School, and this is my second year as a student representative to the Board of Education. I am the president of the Asian American Allies Club, where I work to increase Asian American representation at IHS, and I'm also the president of the Technology Student Association.
[00:01:56] Grace: I am a black belt in Taekwondo, which I really enjoy doing. A teacher that inspires me would be Mr. D, or Mr. DeAngelis, he's my AP bio teacher this year. He really encourages us to explore, and it has inspired me to look towards the future.
[00:02:17] Olivia: Wonderful. Aitan, introduce yourself to listeners.
[00:02:21] Aitan: Hi, I'm Aitan Avgar.
[00:02:22] Aitan: I'm a senior at Ithaca High School, and this is my first year as a student representative to the Board of Education. I'm the president of Model UN here at the high school, and I also run cross country and track and field for Ithaca. In my free time, I love to watch movies and play basketball with my friends.
[00:02:37] Aitan: A teacher that really inspires me is my fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Han. Mr. Han, uh, notably taught me how to find the area of a triangle, but also, he really emphasized teaching students the why and not just the how. And I think that that's something I've carried with me throughout my middle school and high school journey.
[00:02:56] Olivia: Brilliant. That's a good teacher right there. The why is everything, isn't it? Kadek, introduce yourself to listeners.
[00:03:02] Kadek: Hi, my name is Kadek Nawiana, and I'm a senior at Ithaca High School. This is my first year as a student representative to the Board of Education, and in my free time, I enjoy hanging out with friends and cooking on my own also.
[00:03:15] Kadek: Um, in the school community, I enjoy debating as the Vice President of Model UN and writing as a member of the Tattler Editorial Board. For me, one teacher I've really been inspired by is Miss Arnold. She was actually my second-grade teacher in Northeast Elementary School, and she inspired me to be an avid writer and a reader as well.
[00:03:33] Kadek: She's also the Activities Director at her own Ithaca High School right now, so she inspires me even now in her current position.
[00:03:40] Olivia: I cannot thank all of you for taking the time after your school day. I'm sure you're exhausted. You are the most inspiring students I've met. I've watched you on Board of Education meetings. The way you approach having difficult conversations, addressing difficult topics around school issues with Board members in such thoughtful ways.
[00:04:01] Olivia: It just, it rocks my world as a parent, as a teacher, and I want as many other students and adults to learn from your lead as possible. So, the issue I'm naming: our students need to be engaged. We need voices. We need students to understand the why and to push for reasons and thinking behind decisions that are being made at the district level.
[00:04:26] Olivia: You all are brilliant with doing that. I need others to learn from you. So, what I'd love for you to share are the nuances that are, I guess, what's involved with being a student rep to the Board of Education, I'd love to kick it off with knowing how in the world you were selected or elected, I'm not quite sure, to being student representatives.
[00:04:50] Olivia: You can choose who's going to jump in and then roll with it until we feel like there's a good representation of that being answered. Adam let's hear from you.
[00:05:00] Adam: Yeah, so we are elected by the entire of the high school student body. We run for this position just like any other class officer. I think every spring, we basically, um, sit out and get petitions for candidacy and then at some point, there's a school-wide election, which is actually one of a kind.
[00:05:20] Adam: We're the only school-wide elected position and the top four names at the end of the election are the student representatives, the Board of Education. And we serve for one year and then there are elections over again.
[00:05:35] Olivia: Interesting. Okay. So that, that really tackles that question. I don't know if we need to go more in depth to that.
[00:05:41] Olivia: I guess I'd like to know more. Why did you choose this role? So now we know it's an elected position, but what brought you to this calling? Because it's a big responsibility. It's a lot that the role entails.
[00:05:54] Grace: This is Grace. I started running to be a student rep in my sophomore year with only one year of high school under my belt, and I've seen a lot of changes or decisions be made, um, by the administration, by the Board without any student input.
[00:06:14] Grace: And this was when the COVID lockdown and everything was happening. I really wanted to talk about what students we're thinking, and I thought that the student representative to the Board of Education position would be a good platform to do that.
[00:06:34] Olivia: Fabulous. Aitan, what are you thinking?
[00:06:36] Aitan: So, this is my first year as a student representative, and I decided to run for this position last year in around May and part of that decision, like Grace said, was based on COVID and me recognizing that I didn't know enough about the district or district decisions and how they're made in this pandemic, in which I had little control and I was unsatisfied with the kind of education I was getting, mainly because it was online.
[00:07:03] Aitan: I wanted to, you know, one, learn about our district and how to make decisions, and also just get involved and make sure that I can spread that knowledge to the rest of the student body, because I think throughout the course of the pandemic, there was a lot of confusion surrounding just what our district was doing to help and help students flourish.
[00:07:20] Olivia: Thank you. Kadek, what brought you to the table?
[00:07:24] Kadek: Yeah, so, um, what I'm really passionate about and why I ran as a student rep to the Board is we need to, we need to hold our political leaders accountable and need to ensure that students are informed and have a voice in the policies that affect them. I wanted to ensure that students had the best up-to-date knowledge, and I wanted to spread this knowledge.
[00:07:44] Kadek: Before I became a rep to the Board, many students didn't know about the policies that affected them, and I wanted to change this. Becoming a rep to the Board was the best way to achieve this, in my opinion.
[00:07:53] Olivia: Adam, jump in. I know you want to say something.
[00:07:56] Adam: Yeah, I think for me it was like a lot of the reasons that Grace and Aitan and Kadek mentioned, but I also ran two years ago at the end of my sophomore year. And another thing I noticed was that this role existed, and I knew it existed, but I had no idea what the Board of Education representatives did.
[00:08:13] Adam: I wanted to really expand that role because I wanted it to go from more than just giving updates on what's going on at Ithaca High School to the Board of Education, to being a lot more proactive. Also, one thing we've done is expanded the role to be more of a bridge between the student body and the administration in general.
[00:08:34] Adam: So, we meet with our building administration every other week and work closely with the principal to discuss policy and stuff like that as well. And I wanted to really expand the scope of, um, student voice in our district.
[00:08:49] Olivia: Adam, you're walking in my mind. That was a perfect segue because I wanted us to go a little bit deeper in you know, what does this role entail? What are your responsibilities? I heard you just speak to you are meeting on your own time with district administrators. What else would you say? How much time does this role take out of your day, out of your weeks?
[00:09:13] Aitan: We have Board meetings every other Tuesday, and we'll usually get there an hour early, so at 6 o'clock, and then depending on how much is on the agenda, they usually go to around, uh, 9:00/9:30. And in that time, the first hour is us preparing. Us, making sure we know all our points and topics that we want to discuss.
[00:09:33] Aitan: And then the rest is the Board meeting. And then we also meet for around 45 minutes with our building administration every other week before those Board meetings on a Monday. And outside of that our jobs are really just to pay attention to what's happening in our school, in particular, Ithaca High School, and making sure that students have the most up-to-date information um, on what's going on here.
[00:09:54] Olivia: Kadek, jump in.
[00:09:55] Kadek: Yeah. So as the others have talked about our role as representatives to the Board isn't just confined to Board meetings or meetings with administrators. It's also talking to students: conducting surveys and getting a feel for what students want. One recent example of this is we're trying to work with administrators to implement pass-fail, which is a grading policy that will better help students to deal with the current ramifications of the pandemic. We really got a feel for this by just talking to students and talking to our peers.
[00:10:24] Kadek: And seeing what they best wanted for us to achieve at a district and an administrative level.
[00:10:30] Olivia: Fabulous. Adam, I know you want to jump in as well.
[00:10:33] Adam: We also try to get on as many, um, other committees as we can as possible. So, from time to time, our school forms committees surrounding policies and stuff to gauge what's going on in the school.
[00:10:47] Adam: For example, last year in the height of online school, there were multiple committees formed on grading policy and attendance and engagement policy, so we served on those. And we also have worked with the administration to create more spaces for students beyond just the four of us to contribute to the policy discussions going on in our school, in our district, and bring as many voices as possible to the fray.
[00:11:14] Olivia: I'm going to ask how you engage students that may be disconnected. We want as many voices in the mix as possible. How do you bring new voices in?
[00:11:25] Kadek: One of the main ways we do this is through social media. We have an Instagram account. We use it to conduct polls and surveys asking students what they want, what they want us to bring up in the next Board meeting.
[00:11:35] Kadek: We also conduct surveys via school email. If we send out an email to the entire student body and they also respond to what they want to see us do and certain questions they want us to ask in certain meetings. Our school also has Instagram accounts that have a wide reach among students. We work with these Instagram accounts to really understand what the students want and to reach students that might not be able to reach by traditional manners, such as just talking to students.
[00:12:01] Olivia: That's exactly what I was wondering. I think the savvy that comes with understanding social media is underused by a lot of school districts because it's daunting. It's scary. It's hard to monitor. So many of our young adults are using social to communicate. Why not use that as a source to get in touch with others?
[00:12:23] Olivia: I think that's brilliant. So, guys. There's a future meeting coming up. What are the topics that are hot that students want being spoken to? What are you going to bring up to the Board? Grace, can you jump in?
[00:12:37] Grace: Last year, as we all know, there was a big rise in anti-Asian American hate crimes. So, we wanted to increase representation at IHS as there are a significant number of IHS students. And we noticed that our district calendar signifies holidays of certain religions, even though there's no day off, it's listed on the calendar. And I, along with other students noticed that there wasn't many Asian holidays that are pretty important to students. So I advocated that Lunar New Year be added just to note that that is a holiday on the district calendar and they listened…so.
[00:13:22] Olivia: Fabulous. Adam, do you want to jump in as well?
[00:13:25] Adam: Things in the high school can shift really quickly. And basically, what we try to do is just stay on on top of everything that's going on.
[00:13:33] Adam: Another thing that's been very frequent discussion item of ours, mainly at the school level, but recently on the district level as well, has been the proposal to shift our day schedule from an eight-period day with three lunch periods to what would essentially be a seven-period day with one universal lunch that's not a class period
[00:13:55] Adam:. So we've been involved in a lot of discussions surrounding that. Both with our principal with other students and recently at Board meetings when some members of the community have come up with questions surrounding that.
[00:14:07] Olivia: That's a big issue in our house. That topic has been talked about quite a bit.
[00:14:11] Olivia: Universal lunch. There are a lot of fears behind it and how it's going to run successfully. Can you talk about the calendar too, that's come up?
[00:14:19] Aitan: Yeah. Last meeting on the agenda for the school Board of Education meeting, there was a draft calendar. And so before the meetings, we'll usually look over the agenda, see what the Board members want to talk about, what they're proposing for the future.
[00:14:32] Aitan: In this draft calendar, they actually included that we are going to have days off next year for the first day of Rosh Hashanah, uh, and Yom Kippur, which are the, uh, Jewish High Holy Days. And they'll also, in the future, have off on Eid, even though Eid this next year will fall on a weekend, so it will kind of be different, but in the future, they're going to implement that.
[00:14:53] Aitan: And we were able to give our thoughts on that, and Adam and I, being two Jewish students, were strongly in favor, just as... we oftentimes are struggling at the beginning of the school year to make up schoolwork from when we miss for the Jewish high holidays. And yeah, so the Board really values our input on things like that.
[00:15:11] Aitan: And we're also able to express how much their actions actually affect students in, uh, ICSD.
[00:15:18] Olivia: Fabulous. Adam, I'm going to have you piggyback on a ton and then cadet, can you speak to grading after that?
[00:15:23] Adam: Yeah, I think that the whole issue surrounding religious holidays and school calendar is somewhat of a testament to how we've also been able to have an influence on district policy.
[00:15:35] Adam: We had been advocating for this along with other student groups from our local alternative school as well. Last fall, the school calendar was set in a way that would force Jewish students to miss the first day of school because it fell on the Jewish New Year. And so we were able to essentially lobby the Board of Education to change that and shift the calendar so that that wouldn't be the case.
[00:16:05] Adam: And we've been able to do that with a lot of different issues and kind of pinpoint problem points, um, with district and school policy and say: Hey, actually, this is really problematic for students. Can we tweak this somehow? And we've been able to succeed quite a lot.
[00:16:21] Olivia: How did that make you feel, Grace and everyone?
[00:16:24] Olivia: I mean, your voices are coming through. I've seen the calendar of visions be posted on social. I don't think the grownups understand or have any idea that the student voices are really what advocated and pushed for these changes. Grace, how did that make you feel when you were heard?
[00:16:39] Grace: I felt really proud because I thought I made a good case, and there are many times when we talk about a subject, usually they listen, but most of the time they don't choose to follow up or, or they, I mean the Board, choose to follow up or actually delve into the issue, so I was really glad that they listened to us about this topic on representation.
[00:17:12] Olivia: Yeah, I am as well. I want to speak to the calendar and the fact that our identities are so interwoven with holidays, traditions, cultures, Adam, would you be able to speak to the importance and the effect of the calendar changes on your life?
[00:17:31] Adam: Yeah, definitely. You know, a Jewish student in ICSD, having lived here pretty much all my life, I essentially had to choose between my religion and going to school.
[00:17:43] Adam: When you're in elementary school, missing a day doesn't really matter, but as you get older, it starts to matter a lot more. And really, starting in middle school, it had an effect on my grades, my learning. Every year, my first quarter grades were always my worst grades of the year because of just how much school I would miss for Rosh Hashanah, for Yom Kippur, for the other holidays in the fall.
[00:18:06] Adam: And it made me feel torn between someone who prioritized my education, but also someone who really values my, my religion and my identity. And now this change is in effect, at least for next year, it's really validating and freeing in a way as well. I have a younger brother who's in seventh grade and I've, I've already seen him struggle with this.
[00:18:31] Adam: He's had to miss field trips because of them falling on the holidays and important presentations and I'm really encouraged by the fact that he won't have to go through what I did in high school as a Jewish member of ICSD.
[00:18:46] Olivia: I interviewed a superintendent yesterday and we were talking about grading policies and how critical it is to have students voices in the mix.
[00:18:54] Olivia: I'd love to segue to that conversation. Kadek, could you share your thinking around grading policies and what the students are hoping and looking for?
[00:19:02] Kadek: Yeah, another issue that we're dealing with is the continued ramifications of COVID. Earlier in the year, COVID manifested itself in our discussions with the administration through the intricacies of contact tracing, and now it's grading.
[00:19:15] Kadek: Students really feel last year didn't prepare them well enough as previous normal years. We need to find a way to confront this issue of COVID and its continued ramifications grading wise. The administration recently made it so the lowest grade you can get is a 55. Students wanted more though, and we heard their voices.
[00:19:32] Kadek: Because of this, we're currently in the process of getting the administration to implement pass-fail. Pass-fail is when, at the end of the year, you opt for a certain class to be marked as pass-fail on your transcript. It doesn't affect your GPA, and because of this, it's a fantastic safety net. Students have told us time and time again how pass-fail would alleviate their mental health issues.
[00:19:51] Kadek: And, as you know, worsened mental health has been a huge consequence of COVID, and that's something we want to tackle. Because of this, we're working and lobbying the administration to implement pass-fail for this year.
[00:20:03] Olivia: Wonderful. I've got to say it. There is so much more to learn from all of you. We will be continuing our conversation over Episode 13.
[00:20:12] Olivia: After being inspired by you all throughout this episode, I am sure listeners will be as excited as I am for that episode to be released next Monday. Thank you again for your time.
[00:20:24] Aitan: Thank you, Olivia.
[00:20:25] Adam: Thank you so much for having us.
[00:20:27] Grace: Thank you.
[00:20:28] Kadek: Thanks again.