Valentine’s Day brought voices together at Dakota Ridge High School.  Students and teachers used the day off to participate in a Student Voice panel in which they discussed concerns and brainstormed solutions about how to make improvements to our school — together. 

Both students and faculty were well represented at the morning meeting. At the beginning of the session, the room erupted with conversation. First, the teachers had time to speak, then the students had time to raise awareness about issues. Both students and teachers asked each other questions about how our school can change for the better. 

One issue that came up is that some students feel too ashamed to ask for assistance when they need it – whether it be social, emotional, or academic. 

Students also said that they would like to have more freedom when it comes to school projects. 

“I want to see better interaction between teachers and students and how they need to be more understanding of each other so that we can have a better environment that facilitates more open discussions and having more help in classrooms and things like that, just understanding that students and teachers are human beings,” Jonathan Pazen (11) said. “I heard a lot about how teachers are understanding of some of the circumstances that students are going through and how teachers are really trying to be more supportive in students’ lives.” 

But the discussions weren’t all about just positive feedback.  “I did hear some negative feedback about some of the teaching methods and large workloads that students get, and they feel like they’re not always given the freedoms that they want, especially with regards to projects and things like that. I heard that a lot of students want to display their creativity in their classes.”  Pazen said.

Steffan Agne is an 11th grader who also participated in the session. “I thought the student voice panel was a positive activity.  I really enjoyed speaking with the teachers and they were relatively receptive to it, and I enjoyed that,” Agne said.

Near the end of the morning, students brought up how hard college admissions are, and how there is so much testing and stress about the SATs. 

Other issues discussed included the student suggestion that DRHS needs better disciplinary practices in classrooms, and that students who have absences need more time to complete work that they miss. 

“I heard a lot of positive feedback about how even though it’s cliquey here, there are different groups of people that will migrate towards each other like those cliques that are really close and make a good community with each other, and so that was some positive feedback,” Chloe Meehan (11) said.  Meehan also mentioned some of the negative feedback she heard. “Probably some of the disrespect that teachers feel from students and the immature behavior that students tend to show more every year because of the bad influences that the upperclassmen have on the lowerclassmen,” Meehan said. “Issues at this school that are important to me are definitely more integration between groups of people and collaboration with maybe the Diversity Club and the soccer team.”       

Overall this activity led to a positive interaction between students and teachers and was the first step to keep lines of communication open.