Amidst the era of student advisory boards, superintendent search forums and monthly open board meetings, one may think student inclusion and interaction with administration or the Board of Education would be at an all-time high. However, many students have never attended a school board meeting and out of 279 students surveyed by Panorama Dec. 4, just over 40% of those students have never met the superintendent. In a school as large as ours, with over 1,300 students, it is a difficult feat to include each and every student in these decisions while maintaining some semblance of organization for higher-ups.
In order to speak at a board meeting or raise a concern, you must submit a card with personal information such as your full name, phone number and address. Furthermore, board meetings are often held at 6 p.m. or later, a time that makes it difficult for many students to attend. Those without a license or mode of transportation available cannot easily get to such meetings. To combat this, students could try emailing in their concerns or directly speaking to an administrator. However, many of these are forgotten about without constant pressure from the inquirer. But between the large courseloads and countless extracurriculars many students are committed to, there is little time to send follow up emails and schedule in-person meetings to continue the conversation with higher ups.
While the administration has made many efforts to include a variety of student voices in the superintendent search and other important changes or decisions, it is difficult for students to understand that their voice will be heard in these forums when they are only communicated with over a screen. Because of this, in-person conversations between students and administration are ideal for these topics. During the superintendent search, administration understood this and used seminar time to speak with students. However, many students were unaware or not willing to sacrifice their study time for this.
Twice a week during seminar homeroom, students sit for 25 minutes without doing much besides listening to the occasional anti-bullying lesson or filling out a survey. Of these few lessons or presentations, almost none are thoughtfully consumed by students. That is over two hours a month spent mindlessly scrolling on your computer. With so much time spent doing nothing, why aren’t we doing something?
A much better use of this time would be to address the lack of student involvement in administrative decisions by inviting administrators and board members into the classroom for a face-to-face conversation with students and staff. In order to engage conversations and gather student input, there should be several seminar periods set aside for administrators and board members to travel through classes and meet students. As we continue searching for a new superintendent and see a variety of changes in the district policies, accurate and accessible student involvement is a necessity. By bringing higher ups into the classroom and fostering an environment of student engagement with administration, the ability of students to communicate concerns will be easier and student voices will become stronger, ultimately strengthening the overall Ladue community.
![Posing next to her father and brother, Keys smiles at a robotics competition. Keys and her brother often practice coding their robot at home. “Over winter break, me and my brother built the fields [which] allowed us to practice our robot [at home],” Keys said.](https://laduetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/IMG_6035.jpeg)