Across the East End and New York State, young people now have a greater voice in their educational experience, after the state mandated that school boards include a non-voting student member on their board beginning in July of this year.
Pictured Above: Student Ex-Officio School Board Members Stella Brecker, Faith Welch, Laurel Richards, Brooke Walling, Estefani Gomez, Emily Edwards, Mateya Silvera and Nico Grazina at the League of Women Voters event.
These students are sitting on the dais with elected school board members, provided with a packet of information on the board’s topics for discussion and given an opportunity to provide input from the student body on their experiences in school.
Many of these students and their fellow student leaders, from Greenport to Mattituck, Westhampton Beach to East Hampton and many places in between, made a trip to Water Mill on Nov. 19 to share their experiences at the League of Women Voters of The Hamptons, Shelter Island & The North Fork’s annual “Running and Winning” student program.
They were egged on to share their experiences by three local leaders who began their civic engagement as members of school boards — East Hampton Town Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez, Southold Town Councilman Brian Mealy, and former Westhampton Beach School Board President Suzanne Mensch.
No One Grows Up Saying “I Want to be the Town Supervisor”
Ms. Burke-Gonzalez traced back her involvement on the Springs School Board to when her son started Kindergarten, and the district didn’t have enough teaching assistants to staff all the Kindergarten classrooms.
She said she was surprised, when she first went to a school board meeting, to see how little input the board was receiving from the community, and to see how in lockstep their voting patterns were.
“I got the moms together, and we advocated for another teaching assistant. I felt that they needed to hear from young families. That voice wasn’t there.” she said.
They succeeded, and that spark led her on a path to run for the Springs School Board and to serve as its President before running for Town Council and then Town Supervisor.
“I didn’t grow up saying ‘I want to be the Town Supervisor some day. It was just never in the cards,” she said. “I loved public service, as a school board member. Running for public office was the scariest thing I ever did. It was really outside of my comfort zone. I met so many incredible people. We learn more when we listen.”
Ms. Mensch said that, in her experience, many members of the school board were local business owners or people interested in keeping school taxes low, but few were representing the needs of the student body.
Serving during the Covid-19 pandemic, she said, was “such unknown territory for everyone. That was a very divisive topic, very personal and very impactful to everyone’s home life. Their lives were completely upended.”
Mr. Mealy, a graduate of Mattituck High School, said he ran for the board in part because of his pride for his school and its students.
“I walked on faith. I went to school in the district I served,” he said. “If you had asked me what was heaven, it was being on the school board.”
“Engage — be as passionate and authentic as you can be,” he urged the students, adding that many people will mentor them if they ask for help.
“You don’t know what you don’t know. There’s a lot of training. I’ve heard it takes two years to be a fully operating and understanding school board member,” he said. “Take advantage of what’s offered. When you have an opportunity for a learning experience, knock it out of the park. You’re not alone. You’re not in a silo.”
Mr. Mealy, who still serves on the board of Eastern Suffolk BOCES, added that he believes its important that kids “shouldn’t hang their heads when they get on the BOCES bus” to go to technical training schools.
“Be proud because you’re going to be a plumber and you’re going to employ your other friends that have student loan debt,” he said.
He added that meeting student needs in good times helps them through the bad times, too. When the Covid-19 pandemic began, he said, students in Mattituck already had school-issued Chromebooks, and the district had already set up hotspot areas for students who didn’t have internet at home to do their homework, making it easier for the district to transition to remote learning.
“We were setting ourselves up for that kind of event, but nobody had thought of that,” he said.
He also said it’s important for schools to keep mental health resources close at hand to help kids deal with tragedy.
“In my district, we have had some student suicides,” he said. “How do you talk to the kids that are affected by that? You need the therapy people there to talk to the kids. How do you pick up the pieces and talk to our kids and say, hey, are you ok?”
“What is not there? You guys have to tell us that when you sit in these positions. You need to tell us stuff,” he said. “We need to be good listeners.”
Finding Their Voices
Several students said they have begun to see the possibilities of their new role as a voice of the students in their school. While the school boards are required to have at least one student ex-officio member, some local districts have chosen to have more than one.
Estafani Gomez and Brooke Walling of Mattituck said they have been able to give their school board more specific information about issues affecting students, and about fundraising activities the students have been working on.
“We’re bridging the gap between students and administration,” said Ms. Walling. “We’ve made a lot of progress, and made it a better district for all.”
Faith Welch of Greenport, who is also president of the Student Council, collects information on student activities, and is presenting the results of a recent schoolwide student survey to the school board.
She said that, in a small school like hers, “if every student not involved in everything, programs don’t run.”
Ms. Welch had started an African American Studies Club, and was planning to hold a program in December honoring victims of police brutality and wrongful incarceration, but “it’s been hard to do. While it is an important issue, it is also controversial and political. I had to steer it in different ways, which weren’t part of my original game plan.”
Ms. Welch said that, while students seemed to be adjusting to not being allowed to have cell phones in school, they were mad that they couldn’t use their MacBooks in school, which are also in violation of the cell phone ban.
Mateya Silvera of Southampton said she met with several students who were having difficulty in the school’s duel language program, and brought the issues to the board to be addressed.
“Now I have my peers coming to me and we’re getting more into it,” she said. “I think it’s working really well.”
“As a young person, it’s easy to feel hopeless when there are so many big things in the world, and we obviously don’t get a vote,” said Stella Brecker of East Hampton High School. “I think a lot of people didn’t realize they can go to public meetings and your voice does matter, even if you can’t vote.”
She said she has been involved with workshops the district is holding on how to spend a $64 million bond that will be on East Hampton School District ballots this May. The bond will not require an increase in school taxes, due to the end of other debt payments, and the district has chosen to pitch spending the savings on improving school facilities to the voters, instead of reducing taxes.
“We need to balance needs and wants,” said Ms. Brecker. “Some are basic repairs — open wires in the auditorium, asbestos, the middle school windows. The wants are a pool, fixing the courts, subscriptions for study tools. If it isn’t spent, it’s going to be harder to bring it back.”
Nico Grazina, a student representative in Westhampton Beach, said his district recently passed a large bond allowing them to repair their tennis courts and scoreboards. Emily Edwards, who also serves as an ex-officio member in Westhampton Beach, said she felt empowered by the process of delivering Student Reports at school board meetings.
East Hampton School Board member Sandra Vorpahl, one of several adult school board members present, asked the students to consider that their role includes representing the needs of elementary students as well.
Ms. Welch, from Greenport, said her school’s small size made that easier to do. She spoke about a schoolwide art project she’d worked on involving posters about what Juneteenth means to kids of different ages.
Mr. Grazina said he has a sister in middle school, a reminder that siblings of high school students can play a role in sharing information with the school board.
Do School Board Politics Get Ugly?
League of Women Voters Co-President Susan Wilson told the crowd of students that school boards are “one area where there is basically a non-partisanship atmosphere. Yes, there are issues, things they want to change and things they want to make better, but no political party comes into play here. This is a nice way to get started. Today’s politics can be very divisive. This is an easy way to speak up about issues that are important to you, on your home turf, in your own school.”
Ms. Wilson, a graduate of Southampton High School, remembered that when she was in school in the 1960s, the hot dogs in the cafeteria were horrible.
She was just a kid who hadn’t been involved in any kind of activism, and girls were actively discouraged from being politically active. But she and three of her friends decided they had to do something and began a campaign to get rid of the unhealthy lunch choice.
“Three of us very quiet girls were standing before the school board talking about our petition, and how unhealthy these hot dogs are, and they got rid of them!” she said. “I would never have spoken up by myself. Now you have a representative on the school board that you can go to. A lot can be done. I know I’ve gotten more of a voice over the years.”
Students did seem concerned about partisanship, and asked the panelists if they’d seen school board controversies erupt along party lines.
“I’ve never experienced it being along political party lines,” said Ms. Mensch. “It’s been more along the lines of folks who have public sector experience and folks who have private sector experiences. That seems to be a more dividing force.”
“Sometimes our personalities can bash one another,” said Mr. Mealy. “There’s a storming phase, when we got on these boards, and everyone picked up their stuff and moved away from us, as an informal bullying.”
“We bring our experience to whatever we do, and we each have a different moral compass,” he added. “It depends how we comport ourselves, how we restrain ourselves. I always think it’s a good reminder to make it not political, but in western Suffolk and Nassau people are saying ‘I’m running because I don’t want that book in the library.’”
“I’m running because I want to help as many people as I can. I went to school in the district I served. That’s unusual,” he said. “I want more resources than I had, more options.”
Budgeting decisions can have a big impact on students, and Ms. Burke-Gonzalez, who was president of the Springs School District when the New York State 2 percent tax cap went into effect, shared how her district had to cut $1 million from the budget to stay under the cap. They held a public workshop asking the community to chose their priorities.
“We had young parents, seniors having a hard time staying in their homes and teachers where they could hear from each other,” she said. “We had a laundry list of hard decisions to make. We had over 100 people attend and it was a very democratic process.”
“I learned I can do hard things,” she said of her experience on the school board. “The learning curve is incredible.”
“There are so many hard things in this current political climate,” she added. “It’s incredible what people will say now and post on social media. It’s gotten more divisive, but it’s thickened my skin.”
“The sky’s the limit. This is a new position. You are the first students to ever be in that position,” she told the students of their new roles. “You’re creating the template for how this moves forward. There’s a lot of power there, and a lot of possibility.” —BHY
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