Long post incoming. TLDR: kid learns about local politics with a little moment of civic engagement gone awry.
My stepdaughter goes to an IB school, and one of the requirements is that 8th graders have to complete a "Community Project" that involves an act of direct engagement, public advocacy, or research about a public policy issue. Our kid teamed up with a couple of other girls to tackle issues related to the wage gap. They have a teacher who recently had a baby, and they happened to discover that this teacher had been saving up sick time over the last two years in order to take a paid maternity leave, which is not a benefit that our school system offers. The girls were genuinely pretty horrified to learn that even the physical recovery from childbirth is not a covered event separate from regular sick time, so they decided to make it the focus of their project. They learned through additional research that the lack of this benefit is frequently cited by young teachers as a reason for leaving the district, or the profession altogether, and that on average it costs the school district $50,000 to replace a teacher. Last night they attended the school board meeting with the intention of making a 3 minute public comment suggesting what they thought was a reasonable pitch: a 2-week paid leave for new mothers. 2 weeks. That was the most they thought they could argue for. (BTW they recognized that family leave > maternity leave but decided that since the focus of their work was the gender wage gap that they would restrict their request to women only.)
Anyway, they got to the meeting and it turns out that it was one of the most highly attended school board meetings ever, as the district is in the middle of trying to regain oversight of a state-controlled school whose administration was turned over to a charter company after poor performance years. The charter company is refusing to comply with any of the district's requests about, well, anything. The district plans to re-open the school *after* closing it for one full school year. As you might imagine, the families at that school are freaking out a little because no one seems to know what's going on and the charter company has essentially gone radio silent.
Oh, AND the district is in the middle of changing bus vendors without any input from the drivers' union. The savings derived from the change, expected to be in the range of a few million, are expected to come largely from cuts to drivers' benefits. The drivers staged a sick-out this morning, on a scale large enough to cause the district to cancel all busing for all schools, district-wide.
So tensions are high, attendance is high, and suddenly more people want to utilize public comment time than ever before, so our girls, who have been prepping for three minutes, are now told they will have 90 seconds. My kid, who is the third speaker in her group, ends up having time only to say "thank you" before their time is up.
On the way home, she cried. "My first chance to get to speak up for women's rights and all I got the chance to say was 'thank you.' They didn't even let me speak."
It gave us an opportunity to talk a little bit about why the other people had shown up in such large numbers. Some kids' educations are being tossed around by the whims of bureaucrats and a private business because of the arbitrary mess that has been made of standardized testing and privatization agendas. It's also no coincidence that this school is mostly attended by minority students from poorer neighborhoods. Meanwhile, bus drivers are demonstrating the power of organized labor, which is good, and yet families who rely on that transportation will suffer for it. And meanwhile, 3 kids with good intentions showed up in an effort to fulfill the requirements of their district-mandated assignment, and were unable to complete it BECAUSE OF that same district's messy issues.
It's a tough lesson for a kid, and even a tough thing for an adult to untangle when you see such a confluence of problems all at once. This is one school district in one county of one state. If this one institution can have so many problems, it can seem impossible to fix them at a larger scale. Seeing how power is leveraged in different ways, how opposing parties must negotiate, how significant problems get ignored in favor of others, it's all valuable information, but certainly a little disheartening when it's your first experience.
Anyway -- the girls are now working on writing a letter to the editor of the city paper as their next step. As one of them said, "If the school board doesn't have time to listen, then we'll just tell the whole city." I'm too cynical to think it will make much of a dent (not to mention that they understandably don't know the first thing about labor contract negotiations), but I respect the defiant attitude.
