That duo became a trio last year, with the addition of another Kansas City school, Académie Lafayette, as Future Votes KC continued its important work. The addition of the younger students from Académie Lafayette means the group now has an age range of 14 to 18.
Future Votes KC was instrumental in getting voter turnout for Medicaid expansion in Missouri, which passed last year, and collected one-third of the signatures for the Healthy Homes Initiative in Kansas City to make it on the ballot, which also passed.
“We can point to things to say we actually moved the needle in a positive way and both of those things are impacting as many as 250,000 people,” HBHA’s Upper School Principal Todd Clauer. “Kids can look back and say ‘Wow, we really did something here.’ And they also have moments where they realize we didn’t quite get where we wanted.”
Académie Lafayette joined Future Votes KC after transitioning to a high school. It had been a K-8 school since its inception in 1999.
“Academie Lafayette had a strong interest in our program; it was kind of a connection among teacher leaders between the two schools,” Clauer said
He noted that students see themselves as future voters who are engaged in local issues and are paying attention to the responsibility of becoming a voter and having an impact in elections.
Each year, the student leaders help pick projects and then work with community organizations. Currently, the schools work with MORE², short for the Metropolitan Organization for Racial and Economic Equity. It’s a faith-based organization that works with churches and synagogues. MORE² has helped make important connections.
“That has been invaluable throughout the partnership because we’re not taking it up all on our own,” Clauer said. “This has led to meetings with mayors and other officials, policy analysts within organizations and meetings with activists, so it has been a really fruitful part of the partnership.”
Normally students work on a different project each year; however, the past couple years they focused on climate justice. HBHA’s English Department chair and social studies teacher Gina Renee said climate change is the symptom and the goal is reducing emissions.
“The need to reduce global greenhouse emissions — that’s really what it comes down to,” Renee said. “There’s a lot that can be done on the local level, meaning the cities, the municipalities, the county, large campuses [i.e., The Jewish Community Center, KU Medical Center, school districts, etc.] that have buying choices about the energy and consumption choices they make in their organization.”
The focus areas are to push for: solar friendly codes, composting, clean transportation like electric vehicles, and the planting of more trees — organizing urban and suburban areas to have more green space. “Every time you have a green space, especially when you plant with indigenous plants and trees, every one of those spaces is sucking carbon out of the air and pulling it back down to the ground where it belongs,” said Renee.
Diverse students working together
“We want our students from HBHA to be exposed to the diversity of Kansas City, and in Johnson County, that does not happen, even in the public schools,” Clauer said. “By having this coalition, and I would say the University Academy would say the same thing, it is an exposure to students from very different backgrounds, but with high aspirations.”
Like HBHA, University Academy and Académie Lafayette both set high expectations in preparing students for college. “We find that our students have some commonalities in their big dreams, even though their backgrounds on looking at issues of poverty, etc., can be very different,” said Clauer.
He explained that it is important to be working with students from Kansas City because they are looking at issues of injustice across the metro area and having diverse students looking at complex issues is valuable and important in tackling the work and saying what’s going to have the biggest impact.
Renee pointed out there’s a lot students need to learn, like the jurisdiction of local government — what they have control over, what they don’t, and what you can actually ask them to do.
“As an educator, it’s so exciting to be able to teach students about their local government,” she said. “That’s the secret underbelly of Future Votes KC — our kids are learning about local politics and who’s who.”
About 50% of the time spent with the students is building relationships. Future Votes KC has a leadership team of students who work specifically on relationship building with students from the different schools.
Clauer said right now they’re not simply focused on climate change policies in the KC metro area. “We don’t want to just talk about that all the time because the students have lots of interests in things. We help facilitate those kinds of dialogues in small groups and the students really do build some rapport with one another,” he said.
“I think the impact is getting out of your comfort zone, especially Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy, which is a smaller school, and meeting people in a completely different context, realizing that compared to your teachers you have so much more in common with one another because you’re Gen Z wherever you’re from. Teens look at the future and the climate in a different way than we do,” Renee added.
The focus of Future Votes KC is to meet people on the local level who are making real decisions and saying this is what your teenagers are paying attention to and we think you can make a difference by choosing A versus B. “And they feel they can do those kinds of things, which is really pretty amazing as high schoolers. We’re proud of their gusto because I think teenagers have a sense of justice and injustice,” Clauer said.
“It’s a fun process; it takes a ton of work to work between the schools, but we also have passionate educators at all three schools who are excited about these issues, who want our students to feel empowered to make a difference.”