Lauren

Hi my name is Lauren. I am a freshman and after college, I want to go to law school. My goal is to have a career that allows me to advocate and lift the voices of those who may not have opportunities to share their ideas.  This is important to me because I want to support the generation behind me to know that they have opportunities and choices and can do anything they want in life.

I want to talk with you today about how our current educational system is set up in a way that doesn’t meet the needs of all students.  This is important to me because even though for me personally the school system fits all of my needs currently, that’s not the same for every student and this inequity impacts me because of the injustice. I do well in school and have had many opportunities that have enhanced my educational experience. My day starts at 7:00AM and I return home around 9:00PM.  I am a three-sport athlete, take honors classes, and participate in several clubs through my school. In many ways I am a “stereotypical” high school student on the path to college.  I feel like our education is set up for a specific type of student, a student like me.  I’m talking about the kids who all grew up together, all grew up in my town, student athletes who have good grades who will have the choice to go to college or decide what they want to do later on in life.

I notice that if you don’t fit this stereotype for our school then your experience in our school and even your learning is going to be different.  My school has created different ways of putting students into groups: Do you take college prep classes, honors classes, AP classes?  This kind of grouping creates a hierarchy of success and can leave some students feeling like outcasts.  As a freshman, I take both CP classes and Honors classes and I have seen a big difference between the two. In my honors classes, I’m surrounded by all of my friends, all of the people that I’ve grown up with, mostly people who look like me. There is not one single new kid in that class. And then I go to my CP classes and there are so many new kids, so many kids whose names I don’t know. I notice that the amount of POC in my honors classes is significantly less than in my CP. Our school in particular has a very large Portuguese-speaking population and I have noticed that all of most of those students are put into separate classes or the lowest classes. I feel like there are not enough resources for them like langue teachers to give them the same learning experience as every other kid who has grown up into the our town’s school systems.

In my honors class, my teachers give challenging work, the pace is fast, the conversations are rich. But, in my CP classes, I see that my teacher is almost baby talking to the students who she knows don’t speak English as their first language, or to the students who have special needs or who just aren’t like most students in my school. I feel like my teacher doesn’t think that they can learn the way everyone else can. When you drop down one level, to a CP class, you enter this like world where there are almost no educational conversations or expectations of you. This creates an inequitable learning environment and students suffer.

The unequal treatment that I see doesn’t create a safe and supportive environment in my school. It is important that all students get what they need to succeed and at the same time feel that they are important and valued. I think that if my school had more opportunities for teachers to learn from a student’s point of view about what they need, especially from the voices that aren’t being brought up in these conversations.    Please support the Safe and Supportive Schools line item so that all schools can give students the right support.