---

Roundtable discussion with Northwest High School Students

In May 2005, four students from Northwest High School in Indianapolis sat down with WKCD to reflect on where the process has led them so far, and what they've gained. Their conversation is transcribed below.

Presenting our results to others

We had to present our findings to faculty at different schools. We prepared thirty thousand times. One day, we prepared for five hours straight. There were two or three researchers from each of the schools. We presented with each of our school teams, rather than it being a big group presentation.

We wrote all the information that we were going to present on note cards. We summarized everything so that we would make our points clearly and stay on message.

Every time we'd go to a meeting they'd make us practice for it. We would go through page after page after page of survey results, highlighting what we thought was important. At the time, it was annoying, but it really helped us in the end. We'd mess up in practice and they'd just tell us to do it again, over and over until we had it right. Every time we made a presentation, people told us how much we taught them and what a great job we had done.

There's a part of me that wonders if our job as student researchers was just to cooperate with the small schools decision, to endorse a decision that had been made two years earlier, before we had say in it. They wanted to be able to say student voice is important and our opinions count. Once this is all done, once we're in small schools, I worry that we're not going to be listened to anymore. They'll stop involving students. But there's another part of me that says, hey, at least they are involving students, at least they're having us present our findings at high level meetings. It's a start.

Sizing up small schools and paving the way to change

When I first heard about the small schools idea, I didn't like it, but I didn't know why. Now that we've done all this work and research, I understand the problem and I can talk about it a lot better and tell people what kinds of things should change. In the end, I think it'll be all right, but they're changing things that I was really looking forward to in my senior year. I'm willing to work with people to make the system better, but I'm not just going to sit there and say everything's fine.

They thought small schools would be good for teacher and student relationships, but there is so much that needs to be straightened out for it to work. When I was a freshman and we went down to the auditorium to sign up for a small learning community, I didn't have a single clue what was going on. If you're going to make a change like this, you have to take the time to give students the information they need. You can't bring freshmen in cold, tell them to pick a school without knowing what's involved, tell them they'll have to stay in one side of the building all day long and they don't have a chance to see other people or get out of those classes, and so on. You can't just throw all of this at students without helping them see why.

One of the ideas with small schools is that teachers and students stay together for all their years and make strong relationships. But right now I have some teachers that I can't wait to get out of their classes at the end of the year. I don't want a long-term relationship with them.

With small learning communities, I can at least take classes in another SLC that will help me with my career. But once the small schools come around, I won't be able to do that. I won't have the same options I do now. I think everyone figured that the more we learned about small schools, the more we'd support them. But it hasn't worked that way. The more we learned, the more we realized how complicated it is to make the changeover. We learned how small schools means an exchange, where you give up certain things to gain others, and that it takes a lot of careful thought. So even though we might support small schools in the end, there are a lot issues that need to be addressed first in order to make the change a positive one for students.

Other lessons we learned

I've learned to be more open-minded, and learned a lot about talking to people. I also had to learn really quick how to be organized, with so much information and so many meetings.

It's made me think a lot harder, definitely. If you're in a meeting and they ask you a questions right off the bat, you've got to answer it right there. You can't go talk with your friends or your teacher about it, you've got to be ready that second.

After a while, it stopped making me nervous to talk to important people. I've done it so much now, it's like I've already met all the important people in the district, and they all remember me.

I've learned a lot about teamwork. The good thing about it is that we're all pretty cool with each other. We talk with each other during the day a lot. We keep reminding each other if there's something after school, stuff like that. I'm kind of like the team's personal assistant—I always telling people what our schedule is, when they have to be where.

It's opened my eyes a lot to what's happening in our schools. If it wasn't for this project, I wouldn't know anything at all about small schools, and I would have just sat back and watched the district go through with the design and not have participated in the planning.

We know way more than everybody else in our school, and I think that's pretty cool.

Winning a voice in our school

What matters to us more than small schools is a school that takes student voices seriously. Such a school would look a lot more cooperative. Everybody would be role model for each other, everybody would try something new, and we'd each get to share our talents.

Something as simple as a dress code, like allowing kids to wear hats, can make a big difference in how students feel about school. We had a fundraiser for tsunami victims where people could buy a button, and, if they had the button, they could wear a hat on that day. Everyone wore their hats, everyone cooperated. Something as little as that can make a big difference. The say wearing hats disrupts class. Other things disrupt class, like cell phones and bringing food into class, but not hats. Let us be part of the process of creating the rules. Give us a chance to do away with the rules that don't make sense and, believe me, we will truly honor the ones that do.

The problem is that teachers and the people who make all the rules are so much older than us, they haven't been in our shoes in a really long time. They've forgotten what it's like to be a student. If adults would walk around school like us for a few days, and saw what we saw, it would make a huge difference.

We do try to do good, we try to act like we've grown up and mature. But when we try to do the right thing, they punish us without recognizing what we did may have been right.

In the end, students do have power, I guess. The problem is that we don't really know how to use it. And as soon as we start using it, acting like adults, speaking like equals, our teachers don't want us to talk to them like we're the same. As students and teachers, we need to learn how to use our power with each other respectfully, to appreciate each other.

Click here to read what one Broad Ripple High School students says about small schools and change.

Click here to return to "Restoring Hope Where It's All but Gone."