*** Democracies Online Newswire - http://DoWire.Org ***
To access links, see Steven Clift's blog: http://dowire.org/notes/?p=210 Post: One Year Later - Report on Anne Arundel County Student Forum A year ago, Jim Snider used the DoWire network to gather input to help his daughter in a quest to create a meaningful channel for students across a large school district in Maryland to improve their input into decision-making. While most schools are reactively focused on their loss of communication control and crack downs on negative student uses of MySpace, Pallas Snider was demonstrating how to use this medium in a positive manner. Imagine if all student councils or schools constructively invested some time and resources to better listen to students and involve parents "anywhere, any time" online in local schools. If you know of other great examples, add a comment to the blog. Jim's note is below. Steven Clift Democracies Online P.S. This is apparently an unrelated site that has caught the eye of millions of teachers and students: http://www.ratemyteachers.com From: Jim Snider Sent: Monday, April 03, 2006 9:09 PM Subject: one year later... how my daughter fulfilled her campaign pledge to create a permanent, institutionalized discussion forum for constituents of the student member of the Board of Education in Anne Arundel County Last July I wrote to Do-Wire seeking advice on software for setting up a discussion forum for my daughter, who had recently been elected on an e-democracy platform as the Student Member of the Board of Education in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. With full voting rights on a school board with an $800+ million budget, 9,000+ employees, 75,000+ students, and 120+ schools, her election and election promise were a big deal. This is my report on what happened. To fulfill my daughter's campaign pledge to the more than 200 student delegates that helped elect her, we ended up choosing discussion forum software phpBB as the anchor program plus FrontPage for various link pages. We chose as the web hosting service Canaca because it had pre-installed phpBB and promised to regularly update it as updates were announced. The website is located at http://www.aacstudents.org . I will not say that phpBB was the best software, but it was free (a very important consideration) and has proved to be completely stable (another key consideration). The total cost to run the site for the year was $130, $120 for the web hosting service and $10 for the domain name. This came to about 5% of the student government's annual budget. The problem the discussion forum sought to address was perhaps best described by a September 2005 report issued by the National Association of State Boards of Education. The report, "Student Leadership in Education: An Analysis of the Student Voice on State Boards of Education," described the democratic representation problem faced by student members of the board: For students, the greatest frustration was in transferring information back to their constituency. No state, and no student, found the means to engage their peers, much less other high school students, in the policy process. Thus, their decisions were often made in isolation, without significant external input.... Models such as the Internet... could easily facilitate such communication." In a low key sort of way, the site has become very successful, a real institution within the County's system of student government known as CRASC (for a description of CRASC, see http://www.crasc-online.org/whatiscrasc.php). At first we planned to have a PR blitz once we were confident that the site was stable and could scale. My daughter sent a draft press release to the school system's PR office, which prepared a press release and put it on the County's website. Within hours of its posting, my daughter started receiving dozens of lewd and totally inappropriate posts, which she tracked down to the offices, presumably an employee, of the Anne Arundel County Public Schools. Somebody devoted a lot of effort to these posts because the phpBB settings required that separate posts be spaced at least five minutes apart. My daughter immediately reported this spam to the chief information officer for the school system. The result was that the person who posted the offending mater ial was never tracked down but school officials decided that such a site should not be promoted by the school system. Since then, the site has grown quietly but steadily. In addition to an unknown number of lurkers, the site has 169 registered users and 803 posts. It's my sense that there would now be a student outcry if the administration sought to shut it down. Perhaps partly as a result of this website, my daughter was recently admitted to Harvard College for matriculation next fall. In January 2006 the Washington Post ran a profile of her (the text is pasted below), including a mention of her website, on page 1 of its metro section. Last month she spoke about the website at George Washington University's conference on Politics Online. I believe that such student discussion forums will one day be widespread for other student governments and their elected representatives. After all, the technology is very easy and affordable to deploy, and it fulfills a real need. My guess, however, is that similar discussion forums won't take off with regular or career elected officials. That's because, unlike blogs, they have much less central control. With a blog, the elected official retains a lot of control over the posted information. With a discussion forum, especially the type of forum implemented by the student government in Anne Arundel County, power over the public debate is much less centralized. Few elected officials would take that type of risk. But student leaders have very different political incentives. The most powerful among them usually have only a one year term before leaving for college. They also rarely have political ambitions for at least five to ten years into their future. Lastly, they may be significantly constrained by the other members of student government who so recently voted them into office. All in all, then, I believe that my daughter not only created a new type of democratic institution within the Anne Arundel County Public School System but may spur a wave of similar innovation among student governments elsewhere in the country. Special thanks to Steve Clift and Tim Erickson for helping us launch aacstudents.org. The forum rules for accstudents.org are substantially derived from those they created for e-democracy.org. The Washington Post January 3, 2006 Tuesday Final Edition SECTION: Metro; B01 LENGTH: 1007 words HEADLINE: In Arundel Boardroom, Student Has True Clout BYLINE: Daniel de Vise, Washington Post Staff Writer BODY: Sitting on the dais of the Anne Arundel school board in her vaguely Gothic attire, Turkish evil eye earrings and beaded choker, Pallas Snider looks like some sort of Ivy League mystic. But at the moment, she just may be the most influential person on the county's Board of Education. Between French horn lessons and theater rehearsals, this 18-year-old senior from Severna Park High School is subtly shaping the public school bureaucracy that pays her teachers and prints her report cards. She will play a central role this month in deciding high school starting times, possibly the single most volatile issue that will come before the group in the early months of 2006. "I'm not quite sure how to say it -- sometimes you forget that they're a student," said Tricia Johnson, one of seven adults on the school board. Anne Arundel is the only county in the nation, education officials say, with a school board that extends full voting rights to a student. When relations deteriorated between the Anne Arundel board and then-Superintendent Eric J. Smith in a series of bitter, closed-door meetings last summer, Snider was there. Her support for the former superintendent and his projects has placed her on the short end of a five-to-three split on the school board, a stance that has not won her much good will from the five-person majority. ... clip ... Snider has been collecting such opinions all year, in conversation and through an Internet site she created last summer for the purpose of initiating student debate on issues of the day. A discussion thread on school start times at www.aacstudents.org had 51 postings as of Friday, most in favor of the change, and had been viewed 711 times. Among school board members, Snider's lead ally in advocating for later school hours is Paul Rudolph, a retired engineer four times her age. "I put two girls through school," Rudolph said, "and I know how hard it was getting them out the door in the morning." Likely opponents, when the item comes to the board for discussion on Jan. 18, include Johnson, a parent from Davidsonville who says she would be hard-pressed to spend $4 million on school start times when there are teacher salaries and benefits to be paid. "If it comes down to that choice," she said, "it's a pretty simple one for me." Snider's job over the next two weeks -- amid college decisions and AP homework -- is to build her case. "I wish I could go into a class and take pictures," she said. "First period, half the class is asleep. I think that if other board members could just be there and see it, they would change their minds." J.H. Snider, Ph.D. New America Foundation 1630 Connecticut Ave., NW Washington, DC 20009 Phone: 202/986-2700 Fax: 202/986-3696 Web: http://www.newamerica.net E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** Democracies Online Newswire - http://DoWire.Org *** To comment/for links: http://dowire.org/notes/?p=210 To network: http://groups.dowire.org Submit posts: http://dowire.org/submit Member profile for Steven: http://groups.dowire.org/main/contacts/stevenclift ----------------------------------------- Group home for Newswire - Steven Clift's blog posts by e-mail: http://groups.dowire.org/main/groups/newswire Replies go to members of Newswire - Steven Clift's blog posts by e-mail with all posts on this topic here: http://groups.dowire.org/topic/111433 For digest version or to leave Newswire - Steven Clift's blog posts by e-mail, email [email protected] with "digest on" or "unsubscribe" in the *subject*. Newswire - Steven Clift's blog posts by e-mail is hosted by Democracies Online - http://dowire.org.
