At our school, Shake Shack is legendary. Just beyond the prescribed lunch boundaries, their delicious burgers and decadent milkshakes were quite literally just out of reach. The issue of expanding the boundaries came up year after year, yet our school’s Student Leadership Committee never quite managed to successfully change the policy. Although the closest Shake Shack to Fountain Valley School is almost an hour away, my students’ craving for fast food was at the top of my mind when I was at the Leadership Lab. When it was my turn to present a dilemma for consultancy protocol, I raised our issue. How could I continue to advocate for what my students wanted, year after year, without steamrolling them or becoming frustrated by roadblocks?
Through the magic of the Lab–and the brilliance of my lab group–I learned that my challenges actually had nothing to do with milkshakes. Our conversation revealed that our Student Leadership Committee was reinventing itself every single year. We spent so much time forming our group and creating our procedures that we had very little remaining time to get anything done. That’s when one of my colleagues said the magic words: “You need to write a constitution.”
As a Quaker school for students with learning disabilities, writing a constitution might have seemed counterintuitive. The Quaker educational philosophy is all about flexibility, about finding the right way to reach each individual student. And to tell students with language-based learning disabilities that they would be spending their precious co-curricular time writing… well, let’s just say it was a pretty hard sell. It was precisely these guiding principles, though, that made writing a constitution so necessary. A constitution could ensure that we were rooting our actions in the Quaker values of integrity, equity, and simplicity, and could provide concrete scaffolding for our procedures–necessary for all students, and especially for students who learn differently.
While I have been sponsoring our Student Leadership Committee for almost a decade, I learned so much in the process of writing our constitution. As a committee, we learned that we actually didn’t value having one primary clerk presiding over our meeting. The students instead developed a system whereby any student who wanted to facilitate a meeting could put their names on a clerk list and serve on a rotating basis. Everyone stepping up and stepping back–how gcLi is that?
Most importantly, we clearly defined our issue-selection process: How would this committee choose which issues in our school to tackle, and how would we ensure that their policies came to fruition? The students developed a step-by-step process that made room for brainstorming, allowed a quick and democratic narrowing process, empowered students to step up and advocate for an issue, and culminated in a Quakerly consensus process.
When it was time to try out our process and ensure the constitution worked not just in theory but also in practice, we brainstormed dozens of problems that students wanted to solve. We went through the process and whittled the list down to the one issue we agreed was the top priority–we were going to abolish the lunch boundaries. This was going to be the year that our students got to go to Shake Shack.
Collectively, we wrote the proposal to our administration. We went through every possible question they could have, identified every hole they could poke in our plan. We laid out our argument, justified our request, and developed an implementation plan. Laser-focused in their desire, and guided by our new foundational document, our Student Leadership Committee made the best proposal I’ve ever seen from them. We submitted our proposal awaiting feedback, ready to make adjustments and sacrifices. Our administration replied: Sounds good. Let’s do it.
One week later, our lunch room was filled with students happily sipping milkshakes and student leaders beaming with pride. Our student body rose to the privilege of not having lunch boundaries, of having the freedom to spread out across Brooklyn Heights, and to the responsibility to return to the building on time. And I got to tell my Lab group on Zoom the big news: We had codified our practices, and our students were finally getting the Shake Shack they deserved.
At the end of the year, we revisited our constitution and wrote a section dictating how we would revise and amend it in the future. In true Quaker fashion, we made space for flexibility, student agency, and necessary change. We ratified the document by consensus on the final day of the school year.
Soon we will begin meeting with our new Student Leadership Committee for this school year. I can’t wait to see how quickly they can dive into the work and truly start forming, storming, and norming as a group with the guidelines we’ve created. Their predecessors have given them an immense gift, a roadmap to success, allowing for less teacher intervention and more opportunities for students to lead.
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Amanda Toomey wears many hats at Mary McDowell Friends School, a Quaker school for students with learning disabilities in Brooklyn, NY. A college counselor, coordinator of student life, and American Sign Language teacher, she is passionate about helping all students identify their strengths and passions. She credits her enthusiasm for student life to her undergraduate experience at the University of Florida, and her drive to connect with each student to her masters program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their dog.