Watertown High School Students Could Sit on School Committee

Members of the School Committee may have Watertown High School students sitting with them during meetings, and the students may even be able to propose motions at meetings if policy changes being considered by the Committee are approved.

Currently, WSH has two student representatives, who typically provide updates on student life at the high school, including the flow of the academic year and updates on extracurricular activities. A proposed change to the Watertown Public Schools’ policies would give the students a more significant role, School Committee Vice Chair Lily Rayman Read said at the Aug. 26 School Committee meeting.

The School Committee discussed the potential change to the roles of the student representatives during the Committee’s recent annual retreat.

“We talked a lot about this policy. What this policy does is expands on the roles and responsibilities of the concept of student representatives,” Rayman Read said. “It is also very exciting.”

City Council President Mark Sideris, who also sits on the School Committee, asked whether other districts have students who are part of the School Committee. Rayman Read said that multiple other districts in Massachusetts have such roles, and the draft policy borrows from some of their policies. The proposal also used language from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees handbook on the subject.

The students will be part of the School Committee, Rayman Read said, but they won’t be full members.

“They are going to sit at the table. They are going to be part of the committee. They are not going to be voting members, there are a lot of legalities for that, but they are really going to be a robust part of our School Committee,” she said.

One part of the draft policy includes allowing student representatives to propose a motion and have a School Committee member introduce to the full School Committee. Another part would allow student members to propose amendments and have a School Committee member introduce it to the full School Committee.

The change will not be made this school year, but the goal is to have a new policy for next year.

“We have asked that (Principal) Mr. (Joel) Giacobozzi, (Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging) Dr. (Ceronne) Daly and our team and our high school students take on the idea of high school representatives and take this year to think about what this role is really going to look like and how they can really make it a more robust, student centered role that is in going to become,” Rayman Read said.

School Committee member Jessica Middlebrook said she is eager to see how the policy evolves.

“I am really looking forward to seeing how that builds through the year in terms of what kind of voice they want to have and how they want to involve the whole student body in this process as well,” she said.  

Some of the details to be worked out include how the students are selected.

“Currently, our student representatives are typically class president and are voted through the student council process,” Middlebrook said. “We went back and forth thinking about what that would look like and we decided we really wanted to let the students figure out how they want that process to work in terms of who they want it to be, how they were going to be elected, what the advisory council was going to look like.”

See the draft student representatives on the School Committee policy by clicking here.