Come hear directly from Student Equity Leaders from the Manhattan HS District to reimagine and commit to educational freedom by identifying key elements in effective student leadership development and hot to incorporate them into your own work. 

Come listen to how Student Equity Leaders have helped the district move closer to fully paying down the educational debt owed to our young Black and Brown young men, increasing graduation rates for all demographics, while ensuring student voice, advocacy, and adolescent leadership is at the center of our work.   

Since 2017, the Manhattan HS Superintendent’s Office has worked to develop Student Equity Leaders who are student leaders that represent each of our 47 Manhattan High Schools. For the last two years we have been engaged in and working on two projects grounded in the work of Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, Dr. Christopher Emdin, and Dr. Ibram X. Kendi.  

Through this Manhattan HS District professional learning series, students engaged in the pursuits of criticality and identity, and the principles of co-generative dialogues to co-design a lesson plan or workshop that looks at either a historical or current event through the lens of power, justice, oppression, racism, etc. For instance, Student Equity Leaders have interrogated their school’s admissions policies, looked at how race and privilege impacted their lives through an analysis of current events, and have even connected a chemistry lesson on molarity to the effects of environmental racism. 

The second project that students complete focuses on disrupting inequities, is influenced by Dr. Kendi’s work on being antiracist. For this project, students work on an initiative at their school that disrupts inequities. At one school students give feedback directly to a teacher’s unit, and at another Student Equity Leaders have pushed to include student voice and participation in the teacher hiring process at their respective schools to help hire more teachers of color and culturally responsive educators.  To address disproportionality, Student Equity Leaders have also worked to increase the number of Black and Latino male students in advanced courses such as Advanced Placement, College Now, and offer courses based on the interests of the young men of color.