Students call for school board rep

After the tumultuous events of the 2018-2019 school year, there has been an increasing call among UHS students for increased representation on the School Board.

Many students feel that the School Board has failed to adequately represent the interests of the student body.

Senior Avery Wright expressed concerns about the fairness of the school’s disciplinary policies.

“My friend, they kicked him out of school for something that he didn’t do, they didn’t have any valid evidence that he did it. And so they took the safe route by not letting him into school instead of actually getting to the bottom of it and understanding the entire story,” he says.

Wright believes that, had there been student representation on the school board, there may have been pressure to make the process fairer.

Senior Ava Hernandez thinks that student representation could work to address the continued segregation in the district.

“Even if people say [it’s] not, our school is segregated and there’s always those groups like the group of black people, the group of white people, the group of latinos.”

While there are student representation structures at the school, like the student senate, Wright believes they are not adequate to address these issues.

“It’s nice, with dances and stuff, but more serious topics I feel like they don’t have any say at all. And I feel like the representative idea would be really great as far as representing our ideas for change, not necessarily small things like dances and games and stuff.”

The students agreed that it was important to have a democratic process for student representation, rather than allowing staff to hand-pick which students get to be involved.

“Honestly, if you just ask teachers or like high up administrators ‘who do you think should represent us’ they’re gonna be like, oh, this person and this person, just the people they know that are out there. So I feel like it should be more asking the people, ‘who do you want to represent you’ and see what they have to say about it,” says Hernandez.