Student Voices Forums
Exploring racism, equity, and social justice in Sonoma County schools.
Listening With Purpose
In the fall of 2020, Sonoma County Office of Education set out to hear from students of color to understand individual struggles and the larger picture of the minority experience in Sonoma County schools. We don’t see this as a manual for solving racial inequities, but an opportunity for educators and the community at large to begin to understand new perspectives on our schools, paving the way for positive, inclusive changes to curriculum, classroom environments, and campus communities. By listening to our students, we can ensure that everyone has the support they need to be healthy, feel welcome, and find success in school.
Digging into the forum programming, we sought to understand the problems and challenges individual students and specific groups faced, while also making note of proposed solutions. We discovered many shared trends across the groups, so we’ve organized our analysis by those trends, while also presenting unique observations found within each group’s forum to accurately reflect the different lived experiences of racial inequity. Looking beyond this document, we’re focused on how to bring these perspectives, insights, and solutions to life across the broader community. It’s our feeling that limiting our impact by only considering campuses and classrooms is to sell the people of Sonoma County short — specifically those facing inequities across the community.
Shared Challenges
Learn what students across all groups identified as challenges they face in school.
Unique Perspectives
Students from invidivual groups also shared unique points of view in our forums.
Proposed Solutions
Our students know better than anyone: there are solutions to the challenges they face.
Thanks to our students.
We are so grateful to the students who participated in our forums — for their honesty and thoughtfulness. They proved that the more we listen to our kids, the more we can do to improve our schools and our communities.
Pledge Your Support
Sonoma County Office of Education is committed to real, meaningful change in every classroom across our county. It starts with amplifying voices that have gone unheard for too long — we're calling on students to describe their experiences in our learning communities and we're calling on our learning communities to listen.
We’ve partnered with the Equity in Education Initiative to help further the work our Student Forums have inspired by calling on the entire community to pledge to be part of the solution for equity in our school systems.
