Kentucky Student Voice Team Incorporated

The Kentucky Student Voice Team seeks to normalize the presence and participation of young people as partners in education decision making in order to advance more just, democratic Kentucky schools and communities.

We support young people to accomplish our goals through youth-led education research, policy, and storytelling and through building an inclusive, capacity-building culture around our intergenerational community.

Examples of what this looks like in practice include two seminal student designed, analyzed, and reported studies, each eliciting over 10,000 responses from young people in nearly every one of Kentucky’s 120 counties and each designed to shape public narratives and public policy about pressing education issues to ensure that they are more student centered. Our 2020 Coping with Covid study detailed the impact of learning from home on Kentucky middle and high school students in the earliest days of the pandemic and was among the first in the country to lift youth mental health needs as a priority issue for policymakers to address. Our 2022 Race to Learn study captured feedback from middle and high school students about their experiences with race, ethnicity, and school climate and affirmed the need to create space for further discussions about the history and legacy of racism in the classroom despite local and national conversations attempting to censor them.

Beyond our statewide efforts, we also partner with schools at the grassroots level to coach teams of our peers to survey the extent to which their schools are safe, inclusive, and engaging and share results back with their school communities through our student-led school climate audits. We have shared results and the process behind our audits in numerous op-eds on our own blog and podcast platforms as well as through external Kentucky news media outlets and over 50 times in local and national forums, with audiences ranging from the state legislature, the Kentucky Pediatric Behavioral and Mental Health Summit, and the State School Superintendents Association to the National School Climate Center and the Aspen Institute. We have further used our audit data to push back on narratives centering the need to “harden” schools with metal detectors and armed teachers and school resource officers in favor of “softening” them with more mental health support and attention to creating an inclusive environment.

Even though students are the people who spend 35 hours each week learning in classrooms and are the primary stakeholders in our public schools, we are rarely tapped to provide essential feedback on what works and what doesn’t in our education system. However, we know that with structure and support, students can be partners with older stakeholders, including parents, teachers, administrators, boards and other community members, to ensure our schools are the best they can be for all learners.

We are youth-led and inter-generationally sustained. At any given time, we comprise approximately 100 Kentucky youth as members who, in turn, are charged with reaching exponentially more youth and adults through our work across the state to amplify and elevate student perspective to inform education decision making.

Through considerable experimentation, our organization has identified three key strategies that help us ensure greater equity in our organizational culture, practices, and programming. Specifically:

[1] We offer self-selective membership and leadership roles but are intentional about targeting students from marginalized backgrounds–often along with their adult community-based supports–for additional encouragement and recruitment efforts;

[2] We offer compensation for work and training, mileage, and other basics such as meals, and at the same time, offer regular opportunities to collectively and transparently reflect upon and refine our compensation rates and strategies;

[3] We co-design with participants our mission and a number of defined projects that center education equity and justice, building on students’ unique lived experiences and emphasizing throughout an approach that gathers and amplifies the voices of young people who tend to be otherwise least heard.

the KSVT targets an intergenerational audience at the grassroots (school, community, and district levels) as well as the grass tops (policy, legislation). The team conducts roundtables, interviews, and quantitative research that harness, amplify, and elevate the voices and experiences of young people who represent the diversity of the state, and it shares them across a range of platforms to inform public conversations about education. The team runs a podcast and blog; designs and delivers professional development for students, educators, and policy influencers; mobilizes intergenerational coalitions around policy issues and legislative initiatives; generates policy reports, social media, public testimony, and op-eds; and facilitates and normalizes dialogue between young people and other education stakeholders and decision makers.

In recent years, we have published research and stories in over two dozen external academic, public and commercial news media outlets in addition to producing content for our own media platforms. Since our move to a youth-led independent organization in January 2021, we also have published eight major original research studies, (including one that was IRB approved and peer-reviewed), involving over 20,000 Kentucky students from all of Kentucky’s 120 counties, conducted five youth-led school climate audits, created a podcast fellowship program and an education justice op-ed writing workshop series to support underrepresented students to tell stories about their schools, facilitated roundtables and interviews with young people on a host of education issues, presented our work featuring Kentucky students' stories and statistics in local and national professional development presentations and workshops targeting educators, legislators and other policymakers over 70 times, and been cited over 100 times by local and national news media outlets from the Louisville Courier Journal and the Lexington Herald-Leader to NBC News, the Washington Post, and Teen Vogue. Increasingly, the Kentucky Student Voice Team is a brand our Commonwealth and the country associate with credibility in the education improvement and justice space.