Buckle up, folks; I’m feeling salty tonight. Why? Because this controversy over the Howard County Student Member of the Board of Education is getting on my last nerve.
This week, Howard County parents Kimberly Ford and Traci Spiegel filed a lawsuit to challenge the SMOB’s voting rights. As I’ve explained in great detail before, the SMOB, Zach Koung, is authorized by law to vote on Board of Education motions with some exceptions. Because a recent vote on school reopening did not give Ms. Ford and Ms. Spiegel the outcome they wanted, they felt that a lawsuit was in order – not to overturn the decision, but to strip Mr. Koung of his legal voting rights due to his status as a minor.
I’ve written before about the idiocy of directing one’s wrath at Mr. Koung for casting a vote that is meaningless without other adult BOE members voting similarly. He does not make unilateral decisions for HCPSS; he is one vote of eight, and students have one representative while adults have seven. In other words, if he were to put forth a motion to replace all math classes with an hour of Fortnite, he’s going to lose 7-1.
And that’s the entire point here. Mr. Koung is not going to put forth motions as silly as that. The notion that a high school senior’s age makes him ill-equipped to understand the ramifications of decisions that affect him, and his constituency, is so egregiously insulting that it begs the question of why we ask for student input on anything at all. If even the eldest among them is too young and immature to make informed choices, then surely we cannot give weight to what any student claims to want or need. How many of the parents cheering for this lawsuit paraded their students in front of the BOE to testify against redistricting last year? How many of them allow their seniors to choose their own college and major? Or heck, to pick out their own clothing every day?
Including student voices on the BOE and giving them a seat at the decision-making table has long been tradition and law, beginning with Principal Marcy Leonard of Wilde Lake High School, the first SMOB in Howard County. The SMOBs throughout the years have been intelligent, innovative, engaging, and mature. Mr. Koung is no different. The primary customer of the public education system is the student; it is their life trajectories that are permanently altered by their experiences in secondary education. Taking away their vote on decisions that impact them so profoundly would send a clear message that they are powerless.
Either student voices matter, or they don’t. I believe that they do. And I believe that allowing children and teens to make their own decisions, within reason, is the way to build self-awareness, character, independence, and wisdom. On the BOE, the SMOB represents the decision-making power of the student body while the other seven adults serve as the “within reason” guardrail.
We must not allow the most important voice within HCPSS to be silenced.