The Student Council at Lakeshore is a group of student leaders who collaborate with an adult advisor and each other to impact our school community. It is open to fourth and fifth graders interested in decision-making and making a difference.
For more information, contact Resource Specialist and Student Council Advisor Leyla Momeny: MomenyL(at)sfusd.edu
From Student Council Advisor Leyla Momeny
The creation of a Student Council at Lakeshore Elementary School was inspired by this wonderful video regarding self-directed learning. Our motto, accordingly, is “To Be In Charge Of Our Own Lives.”
I encourage students to make decisions, to lead, hold responsibility, handle logistics, run meetings, handle money, create bulletin boards, organize events, plan field trips, and many other tasks. The questions that I often ask include “What do you want to do?” and “How will you do it?”
The idea is for adults to support, as opposed to lead. We want adults to make themselves meaningless, in a way. This allows students to rise to the occasion. And our students have absolutely accomplished this. Some of their chosen priorities for the year focused on environmental awareness, discouraging the use of single-use plastic, and fundraising with sustainability in mind.
They made presentations about the importance of reducing single-use plastic, collaborated with high school design students from RASOTA on a prominently-placed art installation (a large sea turtle made of single-use water bottles), created fun, educational videos about the environmental harms of single-use plastic, distributed over a 100 reusable water bottles to our student body, created signage and bulletin boards, ran meetings, raised funds through the sale of upcycled goods, managed money, and represented Lakeshore at a philanthropic event at a local grocer. Currently, during the school closure, they are working on organizing an end-of-year virtual dance party for the 5th grade class. In addition to these efforts, they participated in endless discussions and collaborations that enabled the events to occur.
While these were the chosen priorities of the 2019-20 council, I am excited to see what the next year will bring. Who will join? What will they do? How will they do it? How will they converse? Engage? Disagree? How will they collaborate and share power and manage themselves? I’ve learned that the answer is hardly: “through more adult support.” If anything, the best adult support that I can provide will be minimal intervention that is deliberately and consciously aimed at rendering myself as irrelevant as possible.
If you know a student in grades 4 or 5 in the fall who is craving agency and decision-making, please let them know that they will have this opportunity through the Student Council. Perfection (in ideas or behavior or conduct or “rightness”) is absolutely not required. Collaboration can be messy and loud. A student-made bulletin board may not attain impossible standards of “Pinterest perfection.” A student-managed meeting may veer off course. But the value of these experiences is that they are authentically child-led and thus inherently more meaningful. So, if you sense that your son or daughter—whether introvert or extrovert, measured or impulsive, talkative or reserved—craves such an experience, please encourage their interest in Student Council.
Leyla Momeny
Resource Specialist and Student Council Advisor
email: MomenyL(at)sfusd.edu