About Us

Students Speak is a ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­coalition of secondary school students and their adult allies from around Massachusetts that represents a diverse set of schools, communities and backgrounds. These young people have come together with the goal of making schools better—for themselves, for their classmates, and for students who come after them—by ensuring that young people have a meaningful voice in the policies that govern the learning environments that shape their lives. Students themselves are in the best position to understand what they need in order to do well in school because they experience it first-hand every day. However, our current school policies do not reflect this wisdom because school leaders make most decisions without listening deeply to young people.

Students Speak imagines a Massachusetts school system where students have a say in how their schools are run, where they feel seen and supported by their teachers, where they get to take classes that actually relate to the real world, and, overall, where they feel excited to go to school. When adults listen to and learn from young people, together we can create better schools.

History

Students Speak took its initial steps in 2019. Building on the advocacy campaign for Safe and Supportive Schools in Massachusetts, advocates with the Education Law Clinic at Harvard Law School conducted interviews with over 70 students across Massachusetts. We asked them a simple question: What do you need in order to do well in school? They shared several common themes: strong relationships with our teachers, calm and caring learning environments, equity and fairness, and “genuine learning” about subjects that reflect their backgrounds and are relevant to their lives. We released a major report documenting these themes and shared it with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

What students shared was so powerful that we knew we needed to make sure adults everywhere, including lawmakers at the State House, were listening to what they had to say. The next year, we held our very first legislative briefing, where we brought together high school students from across Massachusetts to testify before state lawmakers and share their stories and priorities. They spoke to a standing room only crowd and received a huge standing ovation. The young people who testified that day were so energized by the experience that they wanted to keep advocating.

Over the next several years, Students Speak collected dozens of additional pieces of testimony from young people through a partnership between the Education Law Clinic and community-based afterschool programs. Each spring, Students Speak brought these insights to the Massachusetts Legislature with the goal of building awareness among policymakers. With each passing year, we also continued to learn, and our understanding of what students need from their schools deepened and further confirmed the themes highlighted by our 2019 focus group report.

In 2021, Students Speak expanded its reach by supporting students to launch advocacy efforts in their own communities. One such project was a mural featuring the advocacy work of our community partner, Out Now, in Springfield. Students with Out Now worked with artists to design a mural and then brought the community together to paint the side of a building. The mural depicts what a safe and supportive school looks like and serves to use art to raise students’ voices and show the community what young people want their schools to be.

By 2022, we created a forum for young people to come together from around Massachusetts. We called it the Youth Summit and that first year, approximately 40 students gathered at Harvard Law School to lead workshops for their peers about educational justice. Each year since 2022, we have held this annual Youth Summit for 50-100 youth and their adult allies as an opportunity to build advocacy and leadership skills, including learning how to grow their collective power.

In 2025, Students Speak formed the Youth Leadership Team (YLT) to allow our work to grow beyond supporting individual students to raise their voices, and into a movement where students build group power and become movement leaders. Our YLT used the 2025 Youth Summit to educate attendees about pending legislation that represented Students Speak’s priorities and to vote on a bill to put their voices and power behind. They chose to support SB 367, which would require each school committee in the state to have two voting student members. [link to School Committee bill page]

In 2026, we moved into a new phase of work—drafting our own piece of legislation and building grassroots support throughout the state for the policies we believe will increase student voice. Through this bill, we hope to take the next steps in realizing our vision of participatory and democratic schools, where students have a meaningful voice in setting education policy. We hope that you’ll join us!

For more info contact us at info@students-speak.org