In my third year as the principal at Sunnyside Elementary in the Marysville School District, my goals for my students are to have a voice and to feel a sense of belonging and connection to their school. With those goals in mind, I initiated a student council, that would be voted by and would represent our student body, which consists of 480 Kindergarten -5th-grade students. During the voting process, for grades 2nd-5th, a google doc along with a Flip Grid video was created for students to vote. For the Kindergarten and 1stgrade students, a paper ballot was created. While tallying the votes from the kindergarteners (appropriately circled in the crayon), I encountered a “WOW” moment. I realized as I was looking at the student pictures, the span of students with some marginalized diversity. Of the 25 fifth-grade students who took a risk in running for the student council, 2 of them are labeled Multi-Lingual Learners, 3 of them have the label of Special Education, 7 of them have received support through our Language Assistance Program, 11 of them are students of color, and 13 of them identify as girls.
As a principal, I realized that somewhere within the work of focusing on equity, learning gaps, social-emotional learning, and everyday life as a fifth grader, post-Covid, these students somehow found their voice and a sense of belonging. These students, for many reasons, have been excluded as a result of their diversity, but somehow, someway, they found a way to not only belong but to have a voice and the strength within themselves to take a risk to make a change. I am so proud of them!