This case study of youth involvement in public decision-making is one of several done for Health Canada by the Canadian Association for School Health. To return to the beginning of Selected Case Studies of Youth Involvement in Public Decision-Making click here.

Overview

The BC Public School Accreditation Program requires all schools to undertake internal assessment and planning processes and to be reviewed by an external committee every five years. The areas assessed correspond with standards of the Ministry of Education and the interests of individual schools. While outside evaluation of the school is part of the accreditation process, more time and energy are put into the school's internal assessment and development of a five-year growth plan. When the accreditation process is complete, the school receives a grant from the Ministry of Education to implement strategies developed in the growth plan.

The school's mission statement was reviewed as part of the accreditation process. Three different versions of a new mission statement were created by a student committee, the Parent Advisory Committee (PAC) and a staff committee. A new mission statement and guiding belief or value statements will be finalized with input from these stakeholder groups.

The accreditation process also included a survey of students, staff and parents regarding the school's success in meeting objectives set by the Ministry of Education. Responses to this survey and input from staff, student and parent committees helped identify three priority areas for the growth plan: 1) respect and understanding of the values, ideas and beliefs of others, 2) provision for the success of all learners (recognizing and planning for learning styles and rates) through curriculum, instruction, assessment and evaluation 3) supporting self-directed learners who can think critically, identify and solve problems and make reasoned decisions.

Information on this case study is limited because the end of the school term prevented the completion of all planned interviews. The purpose of student involvement in this case was to help shape the growth plan for the school developed as part of the accreditation process. The documentation of the priority areas of the growth plan refers to how student input helped identify priority areas. Surveys and the Student Accreditation Committee provided this input which had a role in shaping the growth plan. The survey involved the whole school population, thus ensuring the representativity of the base of student input. One teacher was identified as the main facilitator of student participation in the process. With extra support from the principal, vice-principals and co-chairs of the internal accreditation team, this level of adult support was sufficient to ensure student input into the process. However, the tight time frame for the process made it impossible to employ more creative input through other means such as a video speakers corner, an idea generated by the Student Accreditation Com mittee.

A.     Basic Descriptive Data

A Clear Relationship to Goals of Schooling

The accreditation process is part of provincial review of schools every five years. The expected outcome is student input into accreditation process.

Diverse Student Participation

All students at the school completed a survey as part of the accreditation process. The Student Accreditation Committee included students from all grades (8-12). It was difficult to involve grade eight students in early stages of accreditation because they were new to the school. It was difficult to involve them in questions of curriculum when they didn't even know where their lockers were. On the other hand, the committee was successful in involving informal leaders from the school's ESL community.

The youth audience is mixed, with a variety of youth from a primarily middle class community. The youth selected to be on the accreditation process tended to be activists and student leaders.

The Youth Participation is not Sustainable

Given the one time nature of the accreditation activity, there is little likelihood that the students will be involved in an ongoing assessment of the school. However, there may be some impact on the operation of the school in regard to consulting students more effectively. Student involvement was included in the school growth plan.

Resources Assigned to Youth Participation

Meeting space for the Student Accreditation Committee was provided by the school as needed, mainly in classrooms at lunch time. Pizza for lunch meetings was paid for through the school's budget for the accreditation process. There was no budget specifically for student participation.

B.     Levels of Involvement

The Student Accreditation Committee and student participation through surveys was episodic according to the definitions used by CMHA (1995). This short-term involvement was appropriate in that the task of the committee was time limited. While this participation may lead to future roles for students in the implementation of the growth plan, such roles were not explicit in the plan.

Individual students volunteered to be on the Student Accreditation Committee, which was facilitated by a teacher. During the planning phase some members of this committee were attendees at meetings with staff and occasional parent participation. The entire student population responded to a survey that helped identify priority areas of the growth plan. Students gave input into the content of the survey and helped shape the growth plan, but were not able to initiate ideas such as a video speaker's corner as part of the accreditation process. Given the time limitations of the process, it was probably best that the Student Accreditation Committee responded to tasks identified by adults. A student-driven process likely would have taken longer than permitted by the Ministry of Education for the accreditation process.

C.     Roles Assigned to Youth

The process was adult-initiated with shared decisions with youth.

D.     The Quality of the Process

Basic Principles of Youth Participation

The teacher facilitator of the student committee recognized that students involved in the committee needed a certain level of ability to understand the accreditation process.

Barriers were not Always Addressed

As the accreditation process proceeded, it became clear that members of Student Accreditation Committee needed to have a certain level of ability and confidence to participate. The need to be committed to the process for a year eliminated some students. Students on the Student Accreditation Committee came up with ideas for involving other students, such as a speaker's corner and a comment box, but there was no time in the short-term accreditation process to implement these ideas.

The teacher/facilitator of the student committee explained the process to the participating students. The accreditation report was made available to students on the committee. The teacher/facilitator also fed written notes back of their last meeting to the student committee at the beginning of each committee

The role of students when meeting with teachers was clearly limited to the accreditation process. Students did not discuss topics such as  individual students or staff members where such participation would have been considered inappropriate by staff.

The teacher/facilitator of the student committee helped prepare students to participate in meetings with staff.

Student were released from class when necessary. Meetings took place at the school during school hours, including lunch time.

The teacher/facilitator looked for informal youth leaders and asked students to suggest good members of the student committee. An example is that informal leaders of ESL students were suggested by their peers.

Enabling Factors

When the Student Accreditation Committee was established, there was no clear plan of how these students would be involved in the accreditation process. Their involvement took shape as the process unfolded. The teacher who facilitated student participation in the accreditation process identified two stages of activity of the Student Accreditation Committee. In the first stage, students on the committee gave input into how to gather the views of students and gave their own input on accreditation issues. During this stage, the committee met regularly at lunch hour. Students got out of class early before lunch, were fed pizza, then spent the rest of the lunch hour working. A few times students on the committee were released for an afternoon when they needed to spend more time with the process. In the second stage, students joined staff and some parent representatives during staff meeting and professional development days to discuss information gathered through polls and surveys and to formulate the school's five-year growth plan. In the first stage, committees of students, teachers and staff operated independently from one another. They came together in the second stage to develop common understandings and plans.

Meeting the Needs of Youth

There was little flexibility in the process.

Youth Accountability

Youth were not accountable to other youth for their participation.

Adults were Prepared to Assist Youth Participate

A teacher took on the role of facilitator of student participation. He was a member of an internal team made up of seven staff who led the accreditation process at the school. He recruited students for the Student Accreditation Committee by following his intuition of who would be capable, and asking for suggestions from other staff and students.

This teacher arranged for meeting space in for meetings of the Student Accreditation Committee. He also put appropriate questions to the committee and summarized their responses for them in order to feed them back at the next meeting. The school's principal filled in when the teacher/facilitator was not available, and vice-principals offered some support to the committee as well. The two co-chairs of the Internal Team for the accreditation process also visited meetings of the Student Accreditation Committee to communicate with the students on accreditation issues. When students from the Student Accreditation Committee joined staff and parents during the planning phase of the accreditation process, their input was respected and valued by the adults. There was some concern from a few staff before the Student Accreditation Committee was established that students' participation in staff meetings would not be appropriate. The main concern was that students would be present for discussions of other students or other sensitive subjects. However, this did not happen as student participation with staff was limited to meetings dealing only with accreditation.

E.     Specific Supports and Processes

The Student Accreditation Committee functioned as an advisory committee during the information gathering stage of the accreditation process. The students from this committee were integrated with staff during the planning stage.

F.     Is there Evidence that the Youth Program has an Impact on Health?

The growth plan created through the accreditation process includes plans for ongoing student satisfaction surveys and further student participation in developing the school's mission statement. Other ideas for student participation include the speaker's corner and suggestion box described above. The teacher facilitating student participation in the accreditation process expected students would play other roles in the implementation of the growth plan but they had not yet been identified. He indicated that involving students in decision-making has become part of how schools operate, and that there will be an ongoing need to clarify roles for students in decision-making processes.