School Committee Bill – 2025
In Spring 2025, the Students Speak Youth Leadership Team (YLT) researched all 340+ bills that were pending before the Education Committee of the Massachusetts legislature. It was a lot of work! The Youth Leaders wanted to make a decision about which bill they should support.
While they researched all the bills, they also held a series of conversations with their peers across Massachusetts to learn what students felt the pressing issues were in their schools.
Then they began narrowing down the 340+ bills to a group that seemed to best reflect what they were hearing from their peers. Ultimately, they ended up with a group of 5 bills that closely aligned with students’ stated priorities.
Teacher Leadership Development
An act relative to the teacher leadership program.
This bill would involve teachers more in school decisions, fund teacher leadership programs, and prioritize teacher diversity.
School Committees
An act relative to student representative voting rights
This bill would require each Massachusetts school committee to have 2 student representatives with full voting rights.
Racially Integrated Schools
An act promoting racially integrated schools
This bill would create and fund options for students to attend different schools in order to promote diversity in student bodies.
Racially Inclusive Curriculum
An act promoting racially and culturally inclusive K-12 curriculum
This bill would require all academic subjects to teach racially and culturally responsive curriculum and combat bias.
Media Literacy & Civic Education
An act establishing media literacy in schools to ensure all children are learning to analyze, evaluate, and responsibly use the media
This bill would require Massachusetts to create guidelines on how students at all grade level should be taught media literacy.
At the 2025 Students Speak Youth Summit, the Youth Leaders presented these 5 bills to other students. They facilitated discussions, supported their peers to deliberate, and ultimately voted on which of the 5 bills the assembled students liked the best.
The bill that won was S367 – the School Committee bill – which would increase student representation on Massachusetts school committees to 2 and give these student representatives the right to vote on matters coming before the committee.
In Fall 2025, the Youth Leaders engaged in intense work to advocate for the passage of this bill. They researched similar laws in other states and interviews people in those states to learn about best practices. They interviewed Massachusetts high school students who currently serve as non-voting members on their school committees to learn about their experiences. And they began meeting with other youth-serving organizations in our state to try to build support for the bill.
In November 2025, all 9 members of the Youth Leadership Team travelled to the State House in Boston to present testimony on the bill to members of the Education Committee. They spoke to a packed auditorium and delivered compelling remarks.
The Youth Leaders wanted the bill to pass, but they also wanted it to be amended to address what they felt were critical omissions. They wanted to add provision to the bill that would:
- Provide training to student representatives
- Ensure student representatives had adult mentors
- Provide stipends or academic credit to student representatives
- Ensure the physical and emotional safety of student representatives
