One Word at a Time.
A message to my school board colleagues in graduation season.
On 21 May, I was asked by the President of the California School Boards Association, Dr. Susan Heredia, to deliver an “inspiration” to the CSBA Board of Directors. This was a moment I could not pass, to encourage my colleagues to reach inward and better understand and acknowledge the struggles of our student body. They need us now more than ever. During graduation season, we need to be sure we go off script and make that acknowledgement. One word at a time.
SACRAMENTO, CA —
Many know that next Friday I will be graduating from San Francisco State University with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. My next step is at Berkeley, for a secondary teaching credential in social science and a Master of Education. But as exciting as moving on to my next chapter is, I look at this singular time in my life as a moment of karios - or, something meant to be. I’m the President of the Board, and the only one to accept the diplomas of a class that sit in the position I found myself in exactly four years ago - someone about to complete the four-year cycle we as school districts set students to seek.
In 2018, the year I graduated from San Lorenzo High School, I did so as the Student Board Member and outside of governance - an absolutely overly involved student. Despite holding titles and playing many roles, positioning myself at graduation was a whole other deal. I knew who the Board President was. I’d like to think I somewhat knew my other colleagues, and funny enough I knew the prompt they were given when accepting the graduating class - word for word. But I asked myself, did they really know me? Did they know my peers in that graduating class? I sat in my seat on stage at the Paramount Theater listening to President Zamudio, “with the power vested in me by the State of California…” While those words blurred, I thought: I did it. I did it after struggling in math. I did it while civically involved. I did it after walking to school every single day. I did it while navigating the hardship of being in a low-income family struggling to make it month by month. I did it when American politics split. I did it as a survivor of sexual assault. I did it. But did they know that? Were they to acknowledge any that? It wasn’t my expectation that they know every breath my peers and I take. It was my expectation the people who set our standards and direct our district acknowledge our struggles.
I want to ask you this - what is it students think when they look at us on that stage? Importantly, what are the families thinking of you? Do those families just hear the same thing they did last year when their eldest daughter, or their sister’s daughter, or their cousin’s kid graduated? Chances are, yeah. Is what we say up there meaningful, or is it just words? It’s a great question for us through all our work. The words we say are just as important as the decisions we make in the boardroom, dais, on zoom calls - you name it. As you look at students in the classroom, as you sit up on the stage for graduations, think of what the students think about when they look right back at you.
I’m sure many of you wonder why it is I fight so hard for student board members, for student rights generally speaking. It’s because I am them. I won’t be able to say that after this year, though. Because my next chapter is already being written. I was once in the shoes of the student who had been told they were “too ambitious,” or that they were “too young” to hold the needles to weave political fabric. Each and every one of our students have been through hell in the last two years - a pandemic in its third year. Some of us will never be able to fully understand the day-to-day struggles of our students or all they went through in COVID. That extends to teachers, our classified folks too. But what we can do is use the voice we’ve got - to say something this graduation season. Not just through a roll call vote. But up at that stage.
What will you, what do you leave with our graduating students? Whether they know who you are, it’s not about you. It’s all of them: the next firefighters, the next artists, the next teachers, our successors, the next generation. I ask that each of us find where students are today, where students are in these hard times. They need us to acknowledge them and work with them now more than ever. One word at a time.
James Aguilar is the School Board President in San Leandro, alumni of San Francisco State University (B.A Political Science, ‘22), former Director at the San Francisco State Foundation, and incoming graduate student at UC Berkeley.
