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Students Flex Rights to Understand Responsibility
Sam Chaltain, coordinator of the First Amendment Schools project, said many people associate those rights only with controversy.
"We have a very overdeveloped sense of rights and a very underdeveloped sense of responsibilities," he said.
  Fifth-grade teacher Suzi Tornberg leads a lesson on the Constitution at Fairview Elementary in Modesto, Calif., a First Amendment School. (Photos By Max Whittaker For The Washington Post) |
The project seeks to create opportunities and lessons for students to get real-life experience at practicing freedom of press, speech, religion, assembly and petition. Students can write constitutions, publish newspapers, elect student governments, plan assemblies, petition for change and participate in community activities.
John Jarvis, 17, a senior at Kennebunk High School in Kennebunk, Maine, was one of two student voting members of a committee that hired a new social studies teacher last year.
Pooja Malhotra, 10, a fifth-grader at Nursery Road, edited this year's student newspaper, which she said was done entirely by students. Her classmate Will Bowman, 10, signed the school constitution, which promises to "establish fairness." That's important, he said, because it "means that you have certain laws and rules that have to apply to everyone."
The idea is simple, Chaltain said: Allow students to feel more involved in their daily lives at school, and they will be more enthusiastic about being there.
There can also be academic benefits, educators say.
"I think schools go about doing things the wrong way," Kennebunk Principal Nelson Beaudoin said. "They try to do things to kids instead of giving kids an opportunity to fully participate in what happens to them."
When Beaudoin became principal, 26 percent of the students said they were enthusiastic about school. In the past year, the third year in the project, it jumped to 76 percent. And, he said, the number of students who graduate with honors has tripled.
"Being able to have a greater say in what goes on in our school makes students definitely take more pride in their work," said Jarvis, the senior. "They don't feel like they are being held here against their will."
And in an age in which the watchword in education is "assessment," these schools are developing methods to determine how well students are doing on traits that might seem difficult to quantify, such as leadership and self-reliance.
"When we talk about ownership or we talk about community, that can be pretty vague, and people can have a variety of different interpretations," said Kim Carter, director of Monadnock Community Connections School in Keene, N.H., who has developed rubrics to assess progress in such areas as "dealing with others" and "group values."
Ultimately, students and educators say, adults shouldn't expect young people to know how to be good citizens if they never get practice.
"The more trust you give the students and the more opportunities to speak our mind, then you can expect that more of us will become better citizens," said Christine Pepin, 15, a sophomore at Kennebunk.
