A conversation with Jennifer Tran of the National Student Board Member Association

An outdated policy on honors graduation stoles started Jennifer Tran’s journey to becoming her Southern California school district’s first student board member. The quest to change the policy led Tran to petition the school board to include a student member. She then ran for and was elected to the seat.

With Zachary Patterson, who served as the student board member on the San Diego Unified School Board, Tran helped establish the California Student Board Member Association. Now a sophomore at University of California, Berkeley, studying education sciences and political science, Tran is a member of the board of advisors of the National Student Board Member Association (NSBMA). Based in Washington, D.C., NSBMA offers training and professional development to student school board members, and it advocates for student representation on school boards nationwide. California’s student board members currently have preferential voting rights, which means student votes are not formally factored into board decision making and cannot be used to break ties.

According to NSBMA data, just 0.7% of the approximately 1,000 students currently serving on district, charter, and state-level boards have full voting privileges, 1.1% have partial or limited voting rights, 24.7% have preferential or advisory voting rights in which their votes are recorded but not counted in official tallies, and 73.5% have no voting rights.

Phi Delta Kappan spoke with Tran about her advocacy for full voting rights for student board members, her board service accomplishments, and going beyond student voice tokenism.

PHI DELTA KAPPAN: How did you become the first student school board member in your district?

TRAN: I started a petition that I circulated around to my high school and the other high schools in the district to get 500 signatures to place a student on our board of education. After the petition got 500 signatures, I sent it off to the district. We have a law in California that says if you petition for this position and get 500 signatures, your board of education is legally required to put a student on the board. So, we got a student on the board. I helped write the bylaws for the position, and when election time rolled around, I ran and was elected as our student board member for the next year.

KAPPAN: Why did you do this?

TRAN: What really got me into education advocacy was the frustration I felt from experiences in my education system. Every kid is mad about something in their education system, whether that is school lunches, or the fact that they don’t get enough recess or break time, or that school starts too early. I was a music kid. I was in choir and band, and I loved the performance arts. I was a member of our performance arts honor society.

I was in my sophomore year when I realized that all the other honor societies at our high school and in the district are able to have graduation stoles. That was the policy: If you were in an honor society, you have a graduation stole. But ours didn’t for some reason. We were not being allowed to wear honors stoles for our graduation. So I got angry about that.

We petitioned the board to get stoles for graduation. And luckily, they listened. They were apologetic, and they changed the board policy to include our honor society.

That’s the first time I saw I could change my education system, and ever since then, I’ve been trying to get other students to feel the same way. If a student is unhappy about something, that should be communicated to our board of education, to teachers, and to policy makers, so kids don’t feel unheard their entire life throughout the K-12 education system and beyond.

KAPPAN: How did you become aware of the school board as a high school student?

TRAN: When I was advocating for the honor society stoles, I talked to different administrators at my school district who said it’s just district policy. I thought, what is district policy? I Googled: Who leads my school district? That was my superintendent and my board of education. I went to my board of education because they met in a public space where I was able to speak out. I could have requested a private meeting with my superintendent but doing that as a sophomore in high school was scary. I thought: Why not bring students to the board of education instead? It’s something board members have to do anyway: sit out here in public and listen to the concerns of the people. Students are people. Why can’t they also have concerns?

KAPPAN: From that experience, you thought maybe you should have some representation on the school board?

TRAN: I saw this lack of authentic student representation on the school board throughout the entire experience of advocating for the honor society stoles. There’s this notion that the board of education really cares about student voices, and they always listen. They do listen: That was apparent in the final outcome of our request about the stoles. But at the end of the day, there wasn’t anyone who I could directly speak to who was my age, who was approachable, and who I could bring this issue to, and they could bring to the school board. In this case, it was me directly reaching out to this board of education and hosting this big gathering for students at the board meeting to advocate for what should have been a very simple policy change. It was an outdated board policy that could have been easily fixed. If I had a student representing me on the board, I could have texted or sent an email and asked if they could bring it up in a meeting and create a resolution to change the policy.

Reaching out to the board of education was scary. Not every student has the capacity or the willingness or even the bravery to do that. Reaching out to a student, a peer, on the board of education is a lot easier. And I want to give students the opportunity to voice their concerns to someone on the board of education who understands them and understands where they’re coming from.

KAPPAN: How did you start the process of getting a student on the board?

TRAN: During COVID, I joined an organization called GENup. It’s a student-led education advocacy organization that started during the pandemic. Through that group, I met Zachary Patterson. Zachary was a student board member in San Diego Unified School District, and he was very passionate about student voice. I started looking at different laws to see if there was anything I could do to add a student to my school board. And I found that there is a law in California says that if you petition for a student board member and gain at least 500 or 10% of your district enrollment in signatures and give that petition to the school board, your school board must legally implement a student board member within 60 days of receiving that petition. We very easily got 500 signatures in my 40,000-student school district. I sent it off to my school board and got a reply from my superintendent, who said, let’s change the bylaws. We’ll add a student representative.

KAPPAN: No one had thought of it before?

TRAN: We had a student representative in the past, but it was more of a circulation of ASB [Associated Student Body] presidents from the district high schools speaking to the board instead of a student board member with an official preferential vote. The board of education was hearing mainly from the class president of one of the high schools, who would give a report on football and prom — things that are happening at the school site level, but nothing policy-oriented. I wanted to ensure that the school district has a representative who would actually talk about what’s going on in the district.

KAPPAN: What was the board service experience like for you? What were your impressions?

TRAN: I think this is my favorite part to talk about. I was a giddy junior, ready and excited to be on the school board. I’m going to make so much change. I’m going to do so much for my school district and so much for the students in my school. And then I got to the board of education. I sat on the dais, and I started speaking to my board members. I very quickly realized that I didn’t have as much power as I thought I would.

I was limited by the law that gave students preferential voting rights. If I voted on something, at the end of the day, my vote did not count. It was up to me to convince the rest of my board members to pass any initiative or to push anything forward. When I was on the board, it felt like a different power dynamic between me as the student board member and the adult board members. It was something that you could feel in the room. I had less power, and it was their option to listen to me or not.

There were a couple of issues on the school board where this came up. We had a big spike in COVID in January 2022. The board of education decided to lift the mask mandate without really discussing it with me. I was at school, and I wasn’t included in those closed session discussions.

Students are people. Why can’t they also have concerns?

There are school districts out there that really do have great student voice systems. And by great student voice systems, I don’t mean systems that tokenize students, that put them in a seat and say they’re going to be listened to but don’t really give them that power of voice.

KAPPAN: Why is there still some hesitancy among some people in power to let students in?

TRAN: Fear is the biggest thing. When you give a student on a board of education a vote, you’re giving away some of your ability to change the outcome of any agenda item, and you’re handing that power to someone who’s significantly younger. I think that’s the biggest barrier: the fear of someone younger being in power or having some sort of voice in the system that concretely matters.

It’s not that people don’t care about student voice. Every person I’ve ever talked to loves student voice; but do they? Or do they love the idea of listening to the student and then spinning it into something they can apply to whatever policy they’re discussing?

In California, there’s still a lot of hesitancy to give someone younger, especially someone under the age of 18, the ability to change something. Even if a board of education wanted to give their student board member a full vote, they cannot under state law. It’ll take a lot of advocacy on the state and district level with students speaking up and saying, “Hey, we want more and we can do more.” Just give us the ability to do more, and I promise we will.

KAPPAN: What accomplishment in your board service are you most proud of?

TRAN: I am most proud of advocating for gender-neutral bathrooms in all our schools. I was on the GLSEN National Student Council in high school as well. I wanted gender-
neutral bathrooms in all our schools. As we were going through the reconstruction of different school sites, I pushed for gender-neutral bathrooms in each of the bathroom pods to ensure that for every male and female bathroom, there would be a gender-neutral bathroom. We got confirmation that in all construction in the district, there would be on-site gender-neutral bathrooms available to students. And we ensured this for every single school site. That was something I was really proud of.

KAPPAN: You worked on a state bill to compensate student school board members. How did that come about?

TRAN: That was during my freshman year of college. San Diego Unified, Zachary’s district, wanted to pay their student board members. They got an assembly member to sponsor the bill, and we discussed language to introduce the bill. Originally the bill limited the payment to $200, or around 20% of what the regular board member salary was. When San Diego Unified bought that to us and asked if we would support this at the California Student Board Member Association, we said absolutely not unless it is changed so there is no limit. We ended up talking to the Senate Education Committee and finally got it overridden so it would be an unlimited amount.

Now San Diego Unified is paying their student board member $20,000 a year. That’s a big change in terms of where that bill could have gone. I’m very proud that the bill went through the state legislature very smoothly with little opposition. It’s something that students really deserve in the state of California. It also just improves equity in terms of the position. If a student who has to work a job after school isn’t able to be the student board member, that’s a viewpoint the board of education is not receiving. To pay your student board member is to gain a student board member with more perspective.

KAPPAN: How important is real student involvement, student engagement, and student voice in schools? What role is NSBMA playing to help?

TRAN: One of the greatest things that you give to your student body is a representative with a full vote in the decision making that rules their daily life and existence when they’re at school. At NSBMA, we meet boards of education exactly where they are. If you have a student board member and they have no voting power on your board of education, come speak to us. We’ll help you write bylaws or speak to your student board members on how to use this role in your state. If you have a student board member with a preferential vote like in California, please send them to our training. We’ll tell them how to use their role the best they can. If you have a full voting student board member, we’d love to speak to them as well.

We see this as an ongoing movement. NSBMA is an intergenerational organization, and that’s something we really emphasize in our mission and our values. We are under an organization called the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), which focuses on education policy. Being incorporated under NCEE allows us to get rid of that student-to-adult barrier that we see on boards of education where a student is fighting against the adult board members. That never works in creating coherent policy. Even if a student does have a vote, you need at least three board members on a five-member board to change anything.

Speaking with adults and ensuring that they understand the student perspective, as well as consistently improving the student board member role over time, is something that we want to do. We want to get to the point where a majority of student board members have a full vote. Hopefully we’ll get there one day, but change is slow.

This article appears in the May 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 105, No. 8, p. 38-41.