High School Students Demand Institutional Voice, Legislators Pat Students on Head

From the Frederick News-Post:

Courtesy Frederick News-Post

As the student representative on the Frederick County Board of Education, Neera Nathan attends meetings and offers input on critical issues affecting the school system.

However, when it comes time to make key decisions, Neera, 17, offers neither a yea or nay vote.

Students representatives to the board are not allowed to vote, a practice Neera hopes to change.

"A student has a different realm of experience than a regular board member," she said. "And they have different specialty they can bring to the board. What a regular board member doesn't have is 12 years of experience in the (school system) they preside over."

This year the Frederick County Association of Student Councils issued its first legislative platform. The association's agenda includes a request that the school board support partial voting rights for student representatives.

The article continues, and features MD state legislators raising as many objections as they could think of when asked about this issue -- everything from we shouldn't trust someone like a student with a vote to well, we could do it, but I couldn't sell it to my constituents, to it's a problem that she isn't elected from the public. Ms. Nathan is nothing short of an incredible student: she's got a 4.6 GPA with 4 AP classes, she served twice as captain of the girls varsity tennis team and is vice president of the Frederick County Association of Student Councils (FCASC). If she isn't capable of responsibly representing the students who duly elected her, I don't know who is.

The sad irony is that the only county School Board in Maryland that has a full voting student representative is also a board whose adult members are wholly appointed by the Governor.