Facilitating District-Wide Changes, One School at a Time
A Conversation with the Grossmont Union Student Collaborative.
As a part of Student Voice’s new Monday night programming structure, we are concluding each month with a transcription of a virtual tour stop. Virtual tour stops are roundtable discussions led by a member of the Student Voice team with the purpose of encouraging and empowering students to think critically about their educational experience.
This month, we had the opportunity to sit down with a few team members from the Grossmont Student Union Collective to discuss student voice and their journey to establish their organization. The Grossmont Union High School Collective is a group of students from the Grossmont Union High School District in San Diego, California that works to make sure all student voices are heard and properly represented throughout the district. The Grossmont Union High School District is made up of eleven high schools that are spread throughout the eastern region of San Diego county.
In this interview we had the opportunity to talk with three members of the organization’s executive board:
James, Senior, West Hills High School, Director of External Relations
Christian, Senior, West Hills High School, Executive Director
Dominic, Steele Canyon High School, Executive Director of Operations
Here is what they had to say:
SV: What is your organization’s story? How did you guys get started and what was the process like?
C: “I came up with the idea of GUSC April 2016 and basically my prior experience of student representation was with the California Association of Student Councils (CASC). Through CASC, I was a governmental affairs committee member for region 12 which was made up of San Diego and Imperial County. So my experiences through CASC drove my inspiration for creating GUSC and bringing something back to my own district…I worked with some of the people that I had met over the years, including James and Dominic, to examine and recognize that there wasn’t a platform for students utilize if they wanted to address concerns that they had. But from that we also looked at this problem on a district wide scale. Ultimately, we wanted to improve the ways that students could share their concerns and opinions in every school throughout our district.”
J: “Yeah and once Christian reached out to me, we immediately hit the ground running to start building and establishing our organization. We worked on fundraising, creating a website, and most importantly, talking to students in our schools. We sat down and put a plan together because we needed to identify the best way to make sure our goals that we had set as a group were being met. We figured out our structure: the executive board which is made up of four members who serve as liaisons between five student representatives from each school in the district. Each representative also serves a specific focus area within the schools so we have one person who focuses on athletics, one who focuses on music and fine arts, one for academics, one for drama and a “head delegate” position that works to oversee all the work being done by their fellow representatives.”
D: “Our job, as executive board members is to look at the different issues that the representatives bring forward to us. Each month we have monthly meetings where the head delegates come together and talk to us directly where we can create a game plan for the month ahead. We can determine if there are students who we should work with, if there are administrators we can talk to, or even teachers and coaches who may be able to help us. At the same time though, we are still a new organization and we have been working around the clock to make our name well known throughout the schools.”
J: “So as we get further in this process, we find ourselves in the position of constantly giving like “sales pitches” to members of the school administration. We have to sell the work that we are doing with the hopes that they are not going to try and knock us down. A key part of the work that we have been doing recently is the delivery of how we market the work we do. When you are in the position that we are in where we have nothing to really show for our work, it is extremely difficult to convince people that what we are trying to do is actually going to be effective in the long run.”
C: “But ultimately, education is a very important part of every person’s life when they are growing up and the ability to have a platform to enhance that is very special and we all have a passion for it.”
SV: Out of curiousity, what has your experience been like while talking to administrators in your schools? Have they been supportive and willing to hear you guys out?
J: “For the most part it’s been a pretty positive process. When we go to talk to school administrators, they seem to “buy” into our process and our ideas. The problem, is though, that I am a high school student. And in their eyes, that is honestly all we are. Now that isn’t a bad thing….I don’t want that to sound like a bad thing but it almost seems as if they feel like we are going to “fail” because of the fact that we are just high school students. We aren’t 40 years old, we haven’t worked in education for 20 years so sure we can talk about what we do but they don’t always buy into it. Some of these people are really cautious about the things that we are suggesting and willing to do.”
C: “Unfortunately though there has been some pushback. GUSC focuses on proving school efficiency at all the campuses in our district and also addressing concerns that students may have. And the major pushback that we have received has been that we represent the same positions that the school’s ASB already has in place but the difference between us and them is that ASB focuses more on school promotion of events, pep rallies, and assemblies but wasn’t really intended for students to address their concerns that they may have. So that is the path that we want GUSC to take…not necessarily a “complaining platform” for students but platform that allows us to address concerns through education policy and real, long term change.”
D: “We hear a lot that this is just going to make things more difficult for administrators in the long run. And that everything we are trying to do is our fault. We are trying to communicate that this is something new and over time, it will get easier once we have actual data and scenarios that we can show for our work. And yeah, like we admit that sometimes it hurts to hear things like that but we are all motivated to prove their suspicions as incorrect and prove that we aren’t ‘just high school students.’”
SV: Let’s transition into the topic of safety and wellbeing. This is apart of a big issue in schools all across the country so is there anything that you hope GUSC can focus on in terms of safety and wellbeing?
J: “Yeah so we are working right now to create another executive board position that would focus on overall student relations. We are working with a counselor at one of the schools in our district that has developed a “peer listening program” that works to train students to talk with students who may have been in a disagreement or dangerous situation. They come in and they talk to a student to hear them out and try to de-escalate the situation. The cool thing is that this program has been proven to be really successful at the school it’s at right now so we want to have someone really focus on bringing it to the other schools in our district.”
SV: Awesome. So finally, what do you guys think that schools and students can do to help protect the physical, mental, and emotional safety and wellbeing of its students?
J: “Schools need to make sure they are treating their students with respect. They need to make sure they are hearing out their students and don’t treat them as if they are a number.”
C: “I think that schools can really work to create a space for students to come together and build a strong community. Some of the schools are really big but if all the students treat each other with respect, there will be a safer environment in general that they can grow in.”
D: “I know that at my school there were many designated days where the freshman spent time with the seniors and got to know each other with the goal of becoming more comfortable with the school. We’ve had the opportunity to focus on building a community throughout the time that I have been a student there and have felt safer and more involved in the long run.”
To learn more about GUSC, visit their website to learn more! http://grossmontunionstudentcollective.com/
Interested in hosting a Virtual Tour Stop at your own school? Email max@stuvoice.org for more information!
