Giving Students A Stronger Voice

Transcript

Chantel: I believe that students have a voice. So I came here to have my voice be heard.

Emmett: We gave our opinions on a bunch of different topics and we made a whole bunch of reports out of them.

Emilie:  We talked a lot about many, many things like the linguistic equalities between French and English.

Tim: …Drugs in school and mutual respect between teachers…

Olivia:  My topic is “let’s be equal”…

Aajab:  I got a view of other peoples’ opinions today about issues that matter to me.

Alexandra:  There’s a big similarity between my school and these schools that are in big cities.

Chantel: Your ideas can all be heard and recognized regardless if they agree with you or not.

Minister Wynne:  This is the first meeting of the Minister’s Student Advisory Council. Sixty students were chosen from around the province to come and be part of a discussion about student engagement and the issues that students are confronting in schools.

Minister Wynne: It is very important to me that we get your ideas — that I hear from you.
We have adults who talk to us on a regular basis, but we don’t have a group that has been pulled together specifically to talk to the minister about issues for students.

Tim: I think it’s important to do something like this — it gets the students’ opinion out there because they know what’s best for the school because they’re the ones going to it.

Emilie:  It’ll produce a change and I think we need that sometimes.

Emmett:  No other person on this council is from Barrie and I am taking all of my ideas home to my school.

Aajab: It was really nice to see a new perspective on different issues that we face at school.

Alexandra:  I really like the aboriginal topic that we had.  It was pretty interesting and I got to say all these different ideas because we (at my school) have a high population of aboriginal students.

Chantel:  You can have a voice and you can have your voice be heard.  It’s a great experience.