Last night's panel Education of Boston Youth was amazing. Two of the speakers were high school students that were members of the Boston School Advisory Council. BSAC is a city-wide group of student leaders who work on policy's and the decision making process for the Boston Public School District. I can't tell you how eye-opening and inspirational it was to hear them speak.

We all always gave Wall High a lot of shit for being well, terrible, but listening to these girls was a slap in the face. I knew the BPS's were bad inasmuch as they are inner city kids coming from low income housing. But the schools are deteriorating at quite a fast pace. The budget cuts hit them hard. At most schools, anyone without tenor was fired. This includes guidance counselors to the point where one school has one guidance counselor. The school isn't as big as mine was, but we definitely had multiple counselors. This is screwing over especially the seniors and juniors who want to take the SAT's and apply for college. Who do they have to help them? One girl said that she had to miss an entire 80 minute class period just to stand in line to sign up for the SAT's. Sounds counter-productive to me. Extra-curricular activities (except for sports) have all been cut-off. ALL OF THEM. Not at all of the schools, but even at the others they have been cut down tremendously. And these aren't kids that can go home afterwards and play. Maybe some of them don't have the family support and these kids especially need something to do, somewhere to go after school. They need the support of faculty to help them out. One school doesn't even have a Student Council Board anymore because they won't pay the faculty members extra to stay after school - so no one does. It's even harder for the older kids who had things to get involved in and teachers to help them out in the beginning, but have suffered because of the budget cuts. I get that the economy is in a bad place right now... but these are children! Aren't they suppose to be the future?

So yeah, the drop out rate is increasing. These kids don't have any motivation to stay! The school provides them close to nothing in extra-curricular's OR in support. Once they turn 16 they can opt to sign themselves out. So they do. This leaves me feeling incredibly helpless and even a little sad.

The upside is, there are kids making a difference. BSAC sounds like an amazing program and the kids who talked to us were incredible. Hearing them say "I love school," "I love education" and "We're not getting the education we deserve" was really inspiring. And they said this part themselves - We hear about the drop out rates, the low funding, the teacher cuts and we all know that Boston Public Schools, for the most part, don't have a lot to offer. But what we don't hear about is the kids on BSAC- re-writing the homework policy, meeting with the Mayor about ways to improve the quality of their education, and teaching themselves how to get through it all. We don't hear about the kids who stand out in front of the state house protesting their right to a better future - no one televises it.

The panel was incredibly engaging and inspiring. It leaves me with the usual questions: What are we doing wrong? How can I help? What's next? Knowledge is good, but finding answers would be better.