How Student Voice Transformed East High

Young people, increasingly, are leading protests and engaging in advocacy for their generation and their communities. Think of the March for Our Lives, organized by students who survived the Parkland school shooting, or Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate activist who started a worldwide movement to demand policy change (and was named Time's 2019 Person of the Year). On the world stage, youth are using their voices to effect change. Shouldn't we also listen to them in our schools?

When designing a plan to transform a low-performing high school in our city, we built student empowerment into its foundation. The stakes were high. We faced both the pressure to prevent the school from closing and the opportunity to reshape it into a place that truly served young people and expanded their opportunities for advocacy.