S2 Episode 7 Empowering Youth Voices: Rachel Belin on a Vision for Equitable Education

PODCAST Season 2 EPISODE 7 

Rachel Belin

Managing Partner 

Kentucky Student Voice Team

Quote of the Podcast – 

“Democracy must be learned by each generation.” This is an adaptation of a John Dewey quote by Earle T. Hawkins, the founder of the Maryland Youth and Government program.

Introduction of Guest BIO – 

Rachel Burg Belin (she/her) is the Managing Partner and, with young people, a co-founder of the Kentucky Student Voice Team. She has decades of experience supporting young people as research, policy, and storytelling partners, acting by turns as a social studies teacher, media literacy nonprofit innovator, education policy aide, development consultant, and commercial radio news director. In the course of this work, she has spearheaded nine different ventures specifically to amplify and elevate the voices of young people as full partners in civic life. With young people as collaborators, she has been the recipient of the Citizen's and Scholars Civic Spring Award, the Kentucky Nonprofit Network Excellence in Public Policy Award, the Pathway 2 Tomorrow Breakthrough in Education Innovation Award, and a George Foster Peabody Award. Rachel holds a BA from Harvard University and an MAT from the University of Rochester.

Interview

Agents of Change: Leaders/Innovators

•  30,000 Ft. View – Why so we, as a society invest in education?
• What drew you to education?
• What do you love about what you do?
• Tell us about What we mean by meaningful student voice; Schools as engines for democracy; the value of out-of-school time in supporting young people to do democracy; students as research, policy, and storytelling partners; the benefits and pitfalls of youth and adult power sharing and more!
• Tell us a story or favorite memory about your work in education.
• What are the biggest challenges to you?
• What would you like decision makers to know?

Podcast/book shoutouts

Best youth podcast: The Bell's "Missing Voices" series, produced by students in NYC 

Especially Topical Read: "High Conflict" by Amanda Ripley 

Oddly amazing show: "Wrestlers" on Netflix

Transcript

Liza Holland [00:00:02]:
Welcome to education perspectives. I am your host, Liza Holland. This is a podcast that explores the role of education in our society from a variety of lenses. Education needs to evolve to meet the needs of today and the future. Solving such huge issues requires understanding. Join me as we begin to explore the many perspectives of education.

Liza Holland [00:00:28]:
Rachel Bergbellen known as she or her is the managing partner and with young people cofounder of the Kentucky Student Voice Team. She has decades of experience supporting young people as research, policy and storytelling partners, acting by turns as a social studies teacher, media literacy nonprofit innovator, education policy aid, development consultant, and commercial radio news director. In this course of work, she has spearheaded 9 different ventures specifically to amplify and elevate the voices of young people as full partners in civic life. With young people as collaborators, she has been the recipient of the citizens and scholars civic spring award, the Kentucky nonprofit network excellence in public policy award, the pathway to tomorrow breakthrough in education innovation award, and a George Foster Peabody award. Rachel holds a BA from Harvard University and an MAT from the University of Rochester. We are delighted to have her today. So Rachel, welcome to Education Perspectives. We're so happy to have you here.

Rachel Belin [00:01:35]:
I'm so happy to be here, Eliza. I've run into you in our various virtual offices enough, and now it's time for the real thing, and I'm very excited to join you on your podcast.

Liza Holland [00:01:47]:
Well, I'm so excited to talk about the amazing program that you've got going on. I was lucky enough to kinda be a part when you were getting it started, and so to see how it's flourished is amazing. But before we get into that, I have to ask you, from a 30,000 foot view, why do you think that we as a society invest in education?

Rachel Belin [00:02:07]:
Oh, that's a great giant question to kick things off. Not not exactly warmer. Why do we invest in education? Our democracy depends on it. We, without an educated citizenry, we would fall apart. We're seeing parts of that now, actually. And I I think the purpose of education is we talk a lot about preparing young people for college and career. And I think the 3rd critical C word is immunity too. You cannot be a thoughtful, engaged citizen in a democracy without a good education.

Rachel Belin [00:02:43]:
So that's my why, for when I think about education and the purpose. And you can't fully realize your own ambitions, but also your ambitions as a member of a larger community. Agreed.

Liza Holland [00:02:57]:
So education, you guys started as a, pilot from the Pritchard Committee, but what drew you, Rachel, to education? What's your journey like?

Rachel Belin [00:03:07]:
So, it's a good question too. Looking back now, I can say that pretty much my whole life has led me to co create the Kentucky Student Voice Team. That's not overstating things, and it can be distilled to a vision of civic life, and specifically public education underestimation of young people to contribute to their communities. And it's also an affirmation of what's possible when we support young people to co design our communities with us. Getting more personal, my father is a former civil rights attorney who helped form one of the first integrated law firms in Birmingham in the sixties, and he was himself drawn to the effort as a Jew growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust. So through him and his stories of youth activism and heroism, really, I was steeped in an early understanding of, as I said, the fragility of democracy and the need to be a full participant in it. As a former youth myself, I found an outlet for some of my admittedly unusual interests as a reporter for this nationally syndicated news service that had young people like me and bureaus around the country reporting, and investigating issues of youth injustice for a broad intergenerational audience. So the work had us interviewing young people from the margins, specifically dropouts, runaways, those who are incarcerated, and also powerful adults, including former US presidents, survivors of genocide, social workers.

Rachel Belin [00:04:43]:
With my team, I then reported on what I learned from real world news media outlets. So the experience of feeling like I could contribute to important conversations at such a young age was so formative that I've spent pretty much the whole rest of my adult life trying to recreate the experience in some way for others.

Liza Holland [00:05:04]:
Boy, that is so powerful. I love how, you know, not only the people around you, but the experiences that you had really shaped it. For those who not who are not familiar, can you give us a brief rundown about what the Kentucky student voice team is?

Rachel Belin [00:05:17]:
Sure. So the Kentucky student voice team, in the words of the students who have been co designing it, who workshopped the mission, is an independent statewide nonprofit organization that is youth led and intergenerationally sustained. And the mission is to support young people to co create more just and democratic Kentucky schools and communities. That's the relatively short mission statement. But the way that young people do this and the way this has evolved is that they do this through serving as education, research, policy, and storytelling partners, very specific strategies. And those have evolved over tons of trial and error, beginning with those early days, the Prichard Committee, which you you saw. We've been experimenting for almost over 12 years now in this space, and those were the key levers that emerged as a way that young people can inject themselves into the public square, into civic discourse, and especially given that most of the students and young people we're talking about are too young to vote. It was a way that we conceived, that they would be effective in amplifying and elevating their voices and the voices of other Kentucky students in education issues.

Liza Holland [00:06:34]:
That is absolutely brilliant. So now I love the piece of intergenerationally supported. That is a such a wonderful hat tip to the people who really wanna make this happen for our students such as yourself. So tell us a little bit about what you love about what you do now that you're on the other side.

Rachel Belin [00:06:52]:
Well, you know, it's funny. I love what I do as I've never stopped doing this work, so I started it as I said earlier, you know, as a young person myself, and I had to evolve with this work as a near peer, as a young adult, as a young professional, and as a decidedly middle aged professional now. And that intergenerational dynamic has always fascinated me. It's always very, very challenging, because in the work that we do, young people and adults really are co equals in the space, and you don't see examples of what this looks like in very many places. You do not typically see this in a school building, because there is a pretty natural and clear hierarchy of youth and adults. I mean, when you walk in a school building, for example, young people are addressing adults by, you know, miss room and miss and and honorifics, and are not working in these same ways we're trying to do. So what we do outside of these spaces, sometimes it takes we have to bring young people along in this culture of a coequal partnership, and we have to bring older people along, to understand, the possibilities of what this can look like. And sometimes we get it exactly right, and sometimes we really don't.

Rachel Belin [00:08:12]:
It's a learning organization. We're pretty deeply in all that we do, and we fail forward just like the good co designers we are, and it's always a work in progress. We incidentally have given talks, young people and adults, in our work, and the adults, just to be clear, are far outnumbered by design by the young people leading this work, but but we exist. There are a few of us who are on staff, and then there's a lot of adult partners and volunteers that do a lot of work with us beyond that. We talk about this across the country because so many youth centered organizations or adult centered organizations that are trying to bring young people into their work want to be able to do this effectively. And they know the power of partnering with youth, and they know the of supporting the people who are closest to the impact of the work they're trying to do to be leaders in that work, and to, in many cases, be the voice and not the tokenized voice of that work. He brought up meaningful student voice. We talk a lot about Hart's Ladder and the different levels of meaningful student voice.

Rachel Belin [00:09:19]:
And we really try to go all types of meaningful student voice, even token can have a place. And by token, we mean typically when students don't have, a role in designing what they're doing. So, you know, students who are part of a photo opportunity, and are a backdrop for adults doing things that might impact them, or students taking an adult design survey, or providing feedback when asked. Those are more surface level things. They're not unimportant, but they're not the most important. So we're always going for something where we're supporting young people as the designers of the work itself at the earliest possible stages. And typically, the highest level of meaningful student voice for us is not just putting young people getting out of their way and letting them go. It's working with young people to circulate power if you're an adult, and to help build social capital and space around what they're doing and helping to platform it in powerful places.

Rachel Belin [00:10:18]:
That is all really important work, and that is where when we're talking about meaningful student voice, that's what we try to realize all the time in this work. I can be more specific about what that has looked like for us in storytelling and research and policy, if that would be helpful. Because it can be very abstract otherwise.

Liza Holland [00:10:36]:
No. I think it would be really good because I think, you know, sometimes you have to start small to go big, and it's exciting to me that there's energy across the country to do this in a in an authentic and valuable type of a way. And so a lot of times, especially when you're talking about major change, people can't really understand it until they can visualize what it might look like. So I would love for you to share some examples of what does that look like, and where could our listeners go to maybe see some of the resources? I know you've done some great reports and whatnot. So

Rachel Belin [00:11:12]:
So our website we're very proud of our website. You can go to kspt.org, and we have really tried to lay things out so that a layperson could understand right away what it is we're trying to do and what it looks like. But I'll just say, very generally, our research policy and storytelling work, each of those strategy areas has young people working with an adult partner, but it's really young people who are designing the all the programming around that specific area. The 3 areas, research policy and storytelling, all intersect a lot, and students are hyper collaborative and always working together on lots of things. But I'll explain a couple activities just to give listeners a taste. So for research, we have, starting with something we pioneered about 8 years ago that high school students helped design, we have paid a lot of attention democratizing research, supporting young people themselves to lead action research, so specifically education action research. We have this idea that young people can be partners in studying the education system itself. 1 of the high school students always says that, you know, in school, it's really interesting because we talk about almost everything except school itself and education itself.

Rachel Belin [00:12:35]:
And so this so we started with these school climate audits again about 8 years ago, and we started in one school in Winchester. We've since done this work all across the state. As soon as I get off this podcast, I'm working with students in Frankfort to do something like this. But essentially, we, support and coach research teams of students at the school level to conduct like a 3 60 audit of, the extent to which their school is safe, inclusive, and engaging. Share back with the entire school community and engage the school community around the data that they find and that they surface. And it makes for pretty incredible conversation across the board, and it gives people a place to start in thinking about what it means to feel safe, included, and engaged at school. But it also invariably supports students to think about who is not like them in in their own school community, who does feel disconnected, and what does it mean if I, as a student, feel that school is working for me? Is that enough? Do I have any obligation to support other students to be successful in my school community? I would argue yes. I would argue especially students who are drawn to our work, even though it's self selective to be a part of our team, no requirement.

Rachel Belin [00:14:08]:
We draw the highest performing students, not only in Kentucky, but in the country to this little team. But I would argue that this can never be about them, the people who are drawn to this work. It is entirely about figuring out how to support other students to be as successful as you, if you've been drawn to this work. And so that research has since been expanded over the last couple of years, starting with COVID. We scaled the work, and we've done 2 statewide studies. We just finished a third. A survey window closed last week. And those first two generated each over 10,000 responses from middle and high school students from almost every single Kentucky county.

Rachel Belin [00:14:49]:
The first one was about COVID and how students were coping, learning with at home, and that was called coping with COVID. The second one, which we released in 2022, is called race to learn. And students did that study at the height of a legislative session, where CRT, critical race theory, was a hot topic locally and nationally. And everyone was talking about students without talking to students. So that was an attempt to inject, so to speak, as we say, youth to power, and to share data and numbers and voice that could inform public discourse. Both of those studies in the last couple of years since they've been released, students have presented them in Kentucky and across the country over a 100 times. They have written the results in peer reviewed journals. They've been published.

Rachel Belin [00:15:36]:
The first one, coping with COVID, was IRB approved. And they, continue to talk about, present, and share that data everywhere because it's so relevant. And the coping with COVID research, I'm just I will say for the record, it was one of the first studies in the country that was done that lifted mental health. It sounded the alarm on mental health before anyone else did. And that study, that survey was given in the early days of the pandemic, just within weeks after schools had closed. That's how quickly these students could move. It was it really underscored to me a lot of things, but among them was that, you know, when our schools shut down, when everyone was paralyzed, that's when students really did go to work. And they were doing unbelievable things.

Rachel Belin [00:16:26]:
So educational, the highest level of synthesis, analysis, all of the highest level thinking they were doing when schools shut down. So I just I think that's just really, really interesting. And it's just one component of many for this work. That's the research. But the policy work, you can see how that research can lead to policy change, too. In both cases, there were policy results and recommendations that came out of these studies that students advocated for. So with COVID, we joined forces with the lieutenant governor. We were advocating around the excused mental health days as a first start.

Rachel Belin [00:17:03]:
And that did pass, ultimately. And then with the race to learn work, we were the team was working against some of the worst of the anti CRT legislation. And there was a real concern that they had that the data showed was really misplaced, that students were already dealing with issues of race and the legacy of racism in schools. So to not equip them and not support teachers to be able to fill facilitate classroom conversations about controversial issues was doing a real disservice, not just to students of color, but to all students. And they expressed that. Almost half of the students responded saying that they thought that racism was a real issue in their schools, that their schools needed to do much more to address it. And that was one of the headline statistics that came out. But we have that data, and nobody else did.

Rachel Belin [00:17:52]:
So we were not just talking, you know, scoring political points. We could say we could point to some numbers, and we could point to some real stories and voice and humanize the conversation a little bit more and keep it where it should be, which is student centered when you're talking about schools. So that's an example of the research and policy, you can see how storytelling plays into that. We launched about a year and a half ago, a journal, an independent journalism platform, broad for a broad intergenerational audience about education issues. It's news and commentary, and we pay students to write as and we pay students, by the way, for everything they do. We value youth labor and we think that that is a really important strategy for equity. And we've noticed since we spun off 3 years ago to become an independent nonprofit and that we were at that point, one of the reasons was we wanted to compensate students for their work. And we have noticed a huge shift in our membership and our leadership.

Rachel Belin [00:18:58]:
We have a really geographically and ethnically diverse membership now, and pretty sure that that is one reason why the ability to compensate students is not the only reason. We've been more intentional about reaching the students from underrepresented backgrounds in all that we do in other ways, but that is one way. And we compare notes with youth centered organizations across the country, and we're trying to really set a market rate for students in this work. We're not paying them stipends. We're paying them by the hour, and we're paying them well-to-do this work. And by the way, students, how can we do that? Students themselves are helping to generate revenue. Students make up about 90% of our board. They are on all of my fundraising and development calls for, with grantmakers.

Rachel Belin [00:19:46]:
They help draft grant proposals. They also generate, fee for service, to the tune of nearly $100,000 a year. We are doing contract work. The side hustle, this isn't even the focus of what they're doing. This is just what they're doing so that they can get paid and do the work that they really want to do, which is the work of the Kentucky Student Voice Team. So it's become definitely a small business, not intentionally, but but that is, you know, something else that we're doing, in this work.

Liza Holland [00:20:20]:
Students never cease to amaze me by their ability to exceed your expectations if you give them the opportunity. I'm just it gives me chills to listen to all of the things that you're talking about, and I love the space that you have cocreated to allow them to learn and to actually get into the, quote, unquote, real world in all of these pieces. Because I listen to all of those experiences, and I'm like, yep. That is every single one of them are transferrable types of skills to such a wide variety of different work.

Rachel Belin [00:20:55]:
Oh, I wanna I wanna say some thank you, Liza, for saying that, but it makes me think too because I've I give a lot of thought to the language around this work, and I have done youth development in my life. I've been a youth development worker, and a classroom teacher, and a whole bunch of other things. And I don't call what we do youth development work ever, and that's because I respect what youth development people do so much. We benefit greatly from youth development programs. But the minute we start saying that this is about the main goal is to is to develop young people and and their skills and capacities, then we're the rest of the world is not focused on what they're actually doing and the impact they're having. It becomes just focused on young people practicing for the real world. Right? So that's the language I like to use in my head. I say that I say youth development is a very natural and welcome by product of everything we do, but it's not the main product of what we do or what we try to do.

Liza Holland [00:21:57]:
I love that. And you're right. Words really matter, and you do not want anything that you're doing to get sidelined into a a box somewhere because you are creating your own spaces and your own boxes and blowing them apart. So that's I appreciate you bringing that up because that is so powerful, and especially in a school type of a situation. You know, like you said, schools tend to be a real hierarchy. It's not necessarily the fountain of democracy that you might think of.

Rachel Belin [00:22:30]:
I taught social studies like so many other I call it I've meet so many former social studies teachers doing things like this everywhere, and I call this gorilla social studies. But I do talk about and think about the reason why I left the classroom, and I taught in Florida. I'm originally from Boston, taught in Florida, been in Kentucky most of my adult life. My husband's from here, so I have a little cred. But I talk about why I left because I found I I say it felt like hypocrisy to teach all about democracy and what felt like sometimes that an autocracy.

Liza Holland [00:23:04]:
Hypocrisy.

Rachel Belin [00:23:05]:
Mhmm. And not just for young people, for teachers too.

Liza Holland [00:23:08]:
Teachers as well. You know, it really resonates with me. I'm doing some contract work right now, and we're working on deeper learning initiative time to time to do this development work and to really change how school is being done. Because our system, the way it's set up right now, doesn't reward really great teachers for staying in the classroom. And we have to find ways to be able to make that happen and make them feel valued very much like your students are feeling valued by getting paid.

Rachel Belin [00:23:43]:
Well and also they know what they're worth. They it gives them you know, they can go into the next marketplace and ask for things.

Liza Holland [00:23:51]:
Oh, so many amazing types of situations. Do you have a favorite memory that you'd like to share about this your time in this work?

Rachel Belin [00:23:59]:
There's one story I like to tell about where a lot of this was driven home to me, like the the disconnect sometimes between the out of school civics work and the in school work, the divide. And by the way, we like to work within schools and outside of schools, both. Like they do not have to be mutually exclusive in what we do. But when in our early days, when we were working on our first piece of legislation, it was House Bill 236. This is a bill to add students to superintendent screening committees that our team drafted and found a sponsor. Unfortunately, it was Representative Derek Graham, our very first sponsor, who happened to be very well positioned as the chair of education. And we had spent a lot of time in Frankfort. I was writing excused absence notes for students and pulling them out of school because everything that's done, all the decisions that are made about school happens smack in the middle of the school day, as you know.

Rachel Belin [00:24:50]:
But we staged a a huge statewide rally on the capital steps and had a lot of legislators come, and students from all over found ways to get excused and come join us and fight for this bill in the waning hours of the legislative session. The students were getting a lot of local and national attention for the work, and it was all incredibly exciting. And I remember one of the students, a high school student from Jessamine County, I was driving her back home after this massive event, and she was looking at her phone. She was she looked a little down. I said, what's wrong? And she said, oh, I just found out I I didn't do so great on a test, and, you know, I didn't get such a great grade on it because I was so consumed with this work, and I couldn't study. And I'm like, well, you know, you had just testified in front of a legislative committee, so that's a pretty good excuse, but I'm sorry if your grades suffered because she was testifying in front of the legislature about her rights as a as a young person to participate in civic life. So there's I think about that all the time, because it really speaks to that disconnect and that the lack of recognition sometimes of of what we might want to value in young people. And there are a couple of other things on deck.

Rachel Belin [00:26:21]:
One thing that I really wanted to just mention today, because we're in the thick of it in this work right now, and that is we have been leading a campaign called the Rose Revival. And for the last year or so, and this is gonna keep this is gonna continue for the foreseeable future, our team is organizing a statewide series of community engagement forums that are focused around the 1989 state Supreme Court decision, Rose versus Counsel For Better Education, which established in statute young people's constitutional rights to an adequate education. So 30 plus years later, our students are are leading the conversation. And we are, in addition to these community forums, we just closed a second another statewide survey to that targeted students, families, and teachers, and administrators, and prompted them to think about the 7 ROWS capacities, and what they are seeing and experiencing related to them. And the question really is, is Kentucky living up to its its constitutional promise in the Rose decision to provide an adequate education? And we have gathered thousands and thousands of responses in that survey window. Hundreds of people already told us they'd like to do a qualitative sit down interviews with us to follow that up. The comments, I've been looking at the back end. I'm I can't stop reading them.

Rachel Belin [00:27:41]:
People are pouring their hearts out from all over the state. They have such thoughtful opinions on the school system. They're never asked clearly. That's what that's what this is an indicator of. And we're going to be working over the next many months to produce a state of schools report that students are gonna share with policymakers and the general public ahead of the next legislative session. And the hope is that this is the kind of work deep engagement, at the grassroots level, intergenerational work led by students, but with definitely with adults side by side. We hope that, you know, this will be a way to reengage people around Rose and Kentucky's own incredible education improvement legacy, which is known around the country, but not always so known in Kentucky itself. And and we hope that this will surface some actionable recommendations, policy recommendations that make sense for people.

Liza Holland [00:28:40]:
Boy, that is so incredibly exciting.

Rachel Belin [00:28:43]:
Yeah.

Liza Holland [00:28:43]:
I just I love that, and I also love that to some extent, we have strayed away from what it was originally supposed to be about and that sort of a thing. So being able to go back that far to be able to really take a look at, are we doing what we said we were going to do? You know, so many things about what you're doing just resonate with me. The inside and outside of school, I firmly believe that we, as a society, have responsibility to help our students, whether it's in school, out of school, at home, wherever it happens to be, to be able to gain the skills to be productive citizens. And so much of that, we've gotten into a bunch of finger pointing, and we've created a bunch of assessment systems that really are looking at content knowledge when you have content in your pocket now. And so the time really is now to be able to to change school and maybe get it back to what it was really intended to be.

Rachel Belin [00:29:44]:
Well, and the process is part of the product. The process of engaging young people as partners in their own education system and conceiving and ensuring that it's just and democratic and it works is a part of this product. And it is a way to do democracy, not just study it at school, but also well beyond school. Along these lines, I'm gonna be taking a couple of Kentucky students, 3 of them. On Sunday and Monday, we are going to Cambridge, Massachusetts. And these students, these Kentucky high school students are delivering a guest lecture to a hundred Harvard law students as part of a class on systems change and really the focus is on how. People closest to impact are affecting systems and policy change from the inside. And that is, you know, what the small band of Kentucky teenagers is doing.

Rachel Belin [00:30:39]:
And it's it's so remarkable. But, you know, I had so much fun writing the excused absence notes for these students for this. It's a real test to see if anyone's reading them at attendance offices. So far, one attendance person has commented with a little bit of shock, which is the desired effect. But I mean, they're really doing amazing things. And these are Kentucky students right under our noses, like really serving as serious thought leaders, not just in Kentucky, but, you know, nationally, at the national level.

Liza Holland [00:31:10]:
Internationally, if you're talking about that. Yep.

Rachel Belin [00:31:13]:
Exactly. Exactly.

Liza Holland [00:31:14]:
How exciting. Please invite them if they're up for it. We could do a follow-up episode and have them talk about the experience and what they've been getting out of all of this. That would be

Rachel Belin [00:31:23]:
The date.

Liza Holland [00:31:25]:
Yay. Yay. So a lot of incredible positive forward momentum, but this is a big ship to turn. What kind of challenges do you all face?

Rachel Belin [00:31:37]:
Oh, well, there's always challenges. I would say that the biggest one for us as an independent nonprofit is because we are so youth led and youth focused, succession is always an issue in youth centered work. As you can imagine, a generation is typically about 2 years, and that's a lifetime if you're 16, 17 years old. 2 years is a very long time. You can do a ton with us in 2 years, but nevertheless, 2 years, and pretty much people move on. We take people the longest serving, students are generally about 5 years. They start in middle school, and they keep going. And we have a lot of senior advisors who are undergrads and young professionals, and just stay on and and really do help help us think a lot of things through strategically.

Rachel Belin [00:32:24]:
But that's a perpetual issue. One of the things I've learned through tons of trial and error is that just because we're self selective, so it doesn't make us equitable. And the equity piece and engaging people of all young people of all backgrounds in this work takes a lot of work and a lot of intentionality. So I mentioned earlier that issues around compensation is an important strategy for equity. It's not the only one. The other ones that I've discovered because I've failed so many times is the need for scaffolding and adult support. What was happening in our early years is we would draw pretty fully formed students who had had a lot of exposure to development programs, really great stuff, like, you know, Kentucky Youth Assemblies, speech and debate, or they were top, top, top students. They were fully formed when they came in this work.

Rachel Belin [00:33:15]:
I have no illusion that the work magically transformed them. They were ready, but we weren't getting all types of students. And if we did, we would lose them quickly. So the retention was a challenge, and we we were always asking ourselves, how do we do how do we retain, and how do we attract and recruit other kinds of students in this work? And so we have since developed some training programs, and we pay students to be trained. So that time, it's not wasted either. In research policy and storytelling at the beginning of the school year, we develop these tracks that are so that people feel connected to smaller teams and project based work right off the bat. Students are designing the project based work for other students and so to rise to the height of leadership in this work means that you are coordinating other students in this work. And we define leadership as your ability to bring other people along with you.

Rachel Belin [00:34:10]:
And if you can't do that, you can't be a leader in this. You just can't. It's hypercollaborative. It is not competitive, and that is an affront to most of what we see in in traditional high schools. We are never pitting the best against the best. And yet, how interesting is it that we still attract high achievers to this work? I theorize that a lot of students who do really well in the system and who benefit from the zero sum game competition don't like it particularly, and they would like to be more community oriented and more collaborative, and they'd like to work with people that they're usually pitted against.

Liza Holland [00:34:49]:
I like that a lot, and I think we need to spend more time and energy thinking thinking that way. That's got my hamster wheel turning. So, unfortunately, we are running out of time, so I need to ask you the final question. What would you like for decision makers to know?

Rachel Belin [00:35:05]:
Oh, what a that's a big question. You started and you end with giant questions. I think decision make, I'm feeling like the needle was shifting in Kentucky. The thing that I wanted decision makers to know and understand when we started this work is I wanted them to appreciate that young people really could be partners in education improvement efforts. And and I have seen that change over the last decade. I think people understand what students on this team are trying to do in the public square. And I think they're making more and more, they're making space for them. I certainly see it with in places like the Kentucky Department of Education, the Kentucky Board of Education.

Rachel Belin [00:35:43]:
I see it, you know, in Frankfurt when people are behaving really well, especially that young people are welcome into these spaces as testifiers. I see newsrooms really being super intentional. Our our journalists, what's left of them, and what's left of our education journalists in particular, are so responsive to making sure they're not just writing about young people without letting young people be a part of these stories and speak for themselves and frame that frame some of the issues. I see it everywhere in Kentucky, and it's noticeable, And the change is noticeable. And I attribute that to the foundation that young people in Kentucky have laid themselves over the last decade plus, not just with our group, but with other groups too. And and so I I want I just wanna see more of this. I wanna normalize young people in these spaces even more, and I want Kentucky to be ground 0 what's showing the world what's possible when you bring young people into these spaces.

Liza Holland [00:36:41]:
That's excellent. And, you know, one of the things education is so prone to is the next shiny thing. It comes and they start it for a little while, and then it just kinda goes. And you all have really created staying power. And now when I go into conversations with leadership in school districts and whatnot, they anytime students are brought up, the student voice team is also brought up. How could we leverage that knowledge and that ability to connect with students and that sort of a thing? So you and your team and all of those who are alumni and supporters have a lot to be proud of.

Rachel Belin [00:37:21]:
I will share that with them, although they can listen to the podcast too. Right?

Liza Holland [00:37:28]:
Thank you so much, Rachel, for being with us.

Rachel Belin [00:37:30]:
It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Liza Holland [00:37:33]:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Education Perspectives. Feel free to share your thoughts on our Facebook page.

Liza Holland [00:37:41]:
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