Why Us Young Nomads Need to Give a Darned About Municipal Elections

* Note this entry pertains to the upcoming political elections in the province of Ontario, Canada. If you are not in this region, you might still find some information of interest, but you may find it less relevant.

As late as two weeks ago I was sitting in the living room of my childhood home arguing with my mother that there was absolutely no point in voting in the upcoming election. My mother, actively involved in the local separate school board and a passionate advocate for improvement in education, was insistent that even if I didn’t care about who was going to be regional councillor, alderman or even mayor, I needed to care about who was running for the school board. My response, “What does it matter if I care? It’s not going to change anything. The people who are going to win the trustee elections are going to be those whose names come first alphabetically. My vote won’t matter.” I followed this up with the fact that I am currently in a partly nomadic state – though I have lived in Ottawa for the past 3 years, I really do not think at this point that I will be here 12 months from now let alone 4 years down the road. I only get down my parents way a few times a year, so I don’t personally have an individual stake in what goes on in St. Catharines either (beyond the well being of my family). I don’t really have a home-home, so not only would registering be a bit tricky, but the results, whatever they are wouldn’t affect me. And all of this was coming from someone who was out blazing the municipal campaign trails at the tender age of 9 and who ALWAYS was badgering my parents to get out and vote in any and every election. I think my mother was shocked, but remained calm and heard me out. After all I’m now 22 years old and I live 7 hours away from her. There isn’t much she could do even if she wanted to.

But I was wrong and my mother was right. Not that this doesn’t happen frequently, but I mean this time I was REALLY wrong. It is important to vote. In fact it might be just as important to get out and vote for your school board trustee as it is to go out and vote for federal elections (if only we could directly elect our Prime Minister in Canada and get to keep the royal back-up plan at the same time). Even if you do not have children of your own, even if you do not have any young cousins, nieces/nephews, family friends etc. it is still important for you to do everything in your power to elect the most capable school board trustees available – leaders and visionaries passionate about creating the best possible learning environment for the children in your community. It is your duty to vote because you live in a society where those people who would are most impacted by the decisions made do not have this power. You have been entrusted with the futures of the children where you live and whether you plan on living in this community for the next 50 years or the next 15 days your decision to vote, or not to vote, will leave a permanent legacy for the children in the school system today.

School board trustees have enormous power to shape the vision of a board of education, to create positive learning environments, to decrease educational inequality by putting pressure on administrators and to empower board administrators to make the radical reforms needed to bring schools into the 21^st century. But just as easily they can block change, use reforms as political pawns and manipulate the system to ensure that even if the rest of the community is failing, their district is safe and sound. These are the only individuals in this system, this system that holds the future of our children (because all of the children in our community are our collective children) in the palm of its hand, that we can hold directly accountable.

And if these arguments alone do not captivate you – remember my fellow upper Gen-Y members it is today’s kindergartners that will be responsible for paying the bill for our pensions (and likely a good chunk of the baby boomers’ as well because heavens knows my generation won’t be able to bear that burden alone). If they don’t have the education system that will allow them to compete in the global economy – that won’t allow enough of them to become doctors, nurses, medics, gerontologists, entrepreneurs – what sort of retirement do you see for yourself? When so many of us will be lucky if we can pay off our student loans before we hit 65, we’re going to need their help like our parents needed us.

It is a shame however that because for so many years they have been faced with an overwhelmingly apathetic electorate, so many of those running for trustee positions have failed to provide the electorate with enough information to make a responsible and informed choice. This is not acceptable. We would not allow any one of the major political parties in this country to elect a leader to contest for Prime Minister without a substantial biography and history of involvement.

This puts the electorate in a difficult position where if we do take the effort to try to learn about the candidates, we essentially have to choose between those candidates who have made the effort to tell us who they are and what they stand for, even if they may not be the most qualified candidates for the job. If you care enough about our schools to put your name forward, you should care enough to stage a campaign, but it is also up to us to tell our candidates that this is unacceptable.

The Ask

So what is it exactly that I am asking you to do?

1. Determine which school board you would want to show your support for. The default is the public school system. If you would like to cast a vote for separate (Catholic) schools, you will need to register as a separate school supporter.
2. Learn who the candidates are. Some have websites, many have emails and some you might have to call. Who seems willing to champion the type of changes you want to see? Who has the best interests of the community’s children (not their own résumés or future political prospects) at heart?
3. Show up at the polls on election day and cast a ballot.
4. Stay in contact and ensure that the trustee you elect continues to exhibit the qualities and pursues the ideas for which you elected them in the first place. Hold them accountable. The real work for a trustee doesn’t end on election day, that is the day on which it begins.

We are All Failed by Failing Schools

If you think that what you have seen above is only an American problem, think again. I wish I could say that I live in a country where all young people regardless of the social, economic or educational status of their parents are able to receive the same educational opportunities but I do not. Neither do my friends in the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland.

I wish that all kindergarten children could see their future as a blank canvas and that the educational system could give them every colour of the rainbow to paint their lives with. I wish that every child could see their school as a refuge and a place of hope rather than a prison, locking them into the circumstances assigned to them at birth. I wish that all schools, all school administrators and teachers were equipped with the resources to provide students with a student-centred education that would allow our young people to find and pursue their talents. I wish that we lived in a country where no parent or teacher ever had to tell a child that they are setting their sights too high and that their dreams are impossible because of their family’s economic resources. I wish that in our low-income communities and working class neighbourhoods success was the rule and not the exception, just as it is in middle and upper class Canada.

These wishes can never become realities in a country that is content with a failing school system in dire need of not just minor repairs but radical reforms. But sadly those who would most greatly benefit from a new way of thinking about education in Canada (and the United States, and the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland…) are currently unable and/or unwilling to demand change. Even sadder, those elected officials who have been given the tremendous power to not just demand but create these changes on their behalf are not doing so. Perhaps if children of our politicians had to attend failing schools this would change, but what could ever convince a parent to place educational limitations on his or her own child when other options are available to them?

Whether someone on the campaign trail is able to appeal to Joe the plumber or not, when would they ever choose to walk not just a mile but 14 years (the time from the beginning of Junior Kindergarten in Ontario to high-school graduation) in the shoes of an unemployed dockworker or a single mother with a family of four?

Have our politicians looked at Canada’s economic picture? Joe the plumber may as well be Bill Gates in comparison to Joyce the Wal-Mart Greeter. My guess would be that Joe wouldn’t let his children go to the school that Joyce’s children go to – and if he did he would probably feel pretty bad about it. Not that Joyce doesn’t know that her children’s school is failing them but when she is working 60 hours a week and still fighting to keep the electricity company at bay, she doesn’t have much time to research her other options now does she? And even if she makes the effort to make the time she just can’t make the money needed to pay the round trip bus fair to send her kids to the better school 3 miles away because that is too far for her 8 and 11 year-old to walk on their own.

My mother has recently written on the issue of fundraising in schools, one that has been in the news over the past month in Ontario. But really fundraising is only the tip of the iceberg. Limiting or eliminating fundraising for essential items (textbooks, science equipment etc.) alone is not going to lead to educational equality. Stopping fundraising all together is still not going to lead to educational equality, even though that would mean that per-student levels of funding would be equal across schools. It can’t be enough, not in a country where some schools are already so far ahead of the pack that it would take decades and decades of equal financial input for other schools to catch up. And, I’m pretty positive that even when the catch up would occur it wouldn’t be because the other schools would have been getting that much better, but because the former leading schools would be getting that much worse. What is the value of equality when it means that all children would be getting an equally terrible education?

What we need is a revolution across the province, the country and much of the English-speaking developed world (I do not know enough about the education systems in other countries to be able to comment on them). And this revolution needs to start with us. All of us. We need to stand up and stand together for real change in education because even if we are no longer in school, our children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews are or will be. We need to join this revolution because every day we ignore the problem we lose another person who could cure cancer, bring peace to the nations, write the great Canadian novel or become the greatest Prime Minister we’ve ever seen to a failing school.

For those parents whose children are in fantastic schools, with high standardized testing results, wonderful fulfilled teachers and textbooks younger than the teaching staff, you may be concerned that taking part in this revolution will devalue the advantages that you too have worked so hard to give your children. But I promise you that it will not.

Making all schools good schools will allow all parents, rich and poor, to regain agency in the rat race that is education. It will mean better schools for all children, including your own, schools that will better prepare children for the world that they will be living and working in rather than the one in which your grandparents existed.

Not a day goes by where I do not think about and am not completely humbled by the tremendous sacrifices (and I really do mean tremendous) that my father and mother have made to allow me to obtain a university education, and the significant sacrifices that I have had to make towards the same ends. It is because of this gratitude that I will not rest until no father ever has to take a second job to send his daughter to a different public (state) school with the hope that this change might one day land a full scholarship to allow for progression to post-secondary education. But even with their support (which was more emotional rather than financial as I started university) and a full scholarship I graduated with a debt load so high that the thought of ever owning a car, let alone a house, is merely a pipe dream.

The time is now to write to our elected officials expressing our concerns, to write letters to the editor and to diligently expose the inequalities of our school systems. The time is now to not only demand change at a governmental level, but to create it from the grassroots up – transforming the spirit of our schools and, by extension, the spirits of our students.

Over the coming weeks and months, I will be providing you with more concrete opportunities to make a difference. Please help where you can.

Unpaid Internships and the Exclusion of Low-Income Students

Over the past six months, the Obama administration in the United States has been more carefully considering the nature of unpaid internships in our southern neighbour. There is concern from the administration that increasingly competitive unpaid internships are exploiting college students for whom the completion of an internship is becoming a more and more essential part of the college experience. With so few jobs available for both students and recent-graduates during these lean economic times, the completion of an (or multiple) unpaid internship(s) has become, in some cases, the only work experience a young person is able to gain in their chosen field.

Though there are a number of types of unpaid internships, by far the most common in the United States are the summer internship (whereby students work full-time hours for 3-4 months during the summer), the semester internship (where students work full-time hours during a single semester) and the post-graduate internship (where students work full-time for the organization for 3,6 or 12 months). Though there is not similar data available for Canada, listings on popular job sites, indicate that a similar trend can be found north of the 49^th parallel. There are also part-time internships, often organized through university field work or practicum courses, which are strictly regulated, limiting the number of hours that can be devoted to internship activities and thus are not a major concern.

The Obama administration in its consideration of unpaid internships in America has primarily concerned itself with the amount of benefit and meaningful experience that interns receive in exchange for their labour. Essentially they are looking into whether interns are actually learning anything or if they are simply spending 40-60 hours a week (though sometimes less) fetching coffee, picking up dry-cleaning and photocopying. For an unpaid internship to be legal in the United States, it is necessary that the intern receive some credit. Because unpaid internships have only recently exploded in popularity in Canada, the legal issues surrounding them are less cut-and-dry.

While ensuring that interns are not being exploited in this way is important, there are a number of other issues surrounding the rise of unpaid internships in both the United States and Canada as well, that have yet to be adequately addressed. In particular, the way in which a reliance on unpaid internships for early work experience leads to the exclusion of students from families on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder from future employment in many of the potentially highest paying fields is worthy of serious investigation.

There are a number of factors that render full-time unpaid internships not just unfeasible, but impossible for students from lower-income families. While the most significant barriers are financial, there are also social barriers that often are not considered by advocates for internships. For example, it can be more difficult to land that ‘dream internship’, especially in the most competitive industries such as music, internet development, marketing, filmmaking and publishing, without key social connections, often forged through family relationships and ‘old boys/girls clubs’. Though most internship programs purport to be non-biased in their selection process, as anyone who has ever been on the job market knows, landing your dream job (regardless of how neutral it advertises itself as being) can be based more on who you know than what you know.

Even if a low-income student would stand a reasonable chance of success in the application process, the financial realities of unpaid work present an enormous challenge for low-income students. For those whose families are either unable or unwilling to financially support a college/university student, survival requires financial remuneration. For students who have no choice but to be financially self-sufficient the long-term benefits of completing an unpaid internship are no competition for the short-term necessity of financial sustenance and the ability of any paid job (often a minimum-wage service job) to provide basic shelter and food.

That there is no shortage of qualified applicants who are able and willing, to work unpaid internships, is undeniable. But, by not providing remuneration, these organizations are potentially cutting themselves off from the very best candidates, candidates who, by virtue of not just their excellence in university or college, but their very presence in higher education, have defied the odds. These are young people who keenly understand the importance of hard work. They know how to provide high-quality work consistently with the least amount of resources. These young men and women are flexible and creative not by choice, but as a matter of necessity. They are exactly the kind of future employees today’s companies need, especially in the wake of a global recession, but may never find under current recruiting practices.

Though the appeal of unpaid internships for companies is certainly understandable (after all who would turn down more or less *free* labour), it is time that companies begin to make the same short term sacrifices for long term benefits that they have been asking from students for so many years.

Past the What and Into the Who

My sister is just going into her second year of high school. Every time I talk to her, though she doesn’t realize it, she teaches me a tremendous amount about life and about survival.

When principals, teachers and, unfortunately, even parents talk about the problem of bullying in their schools and in the lives of the children that they spend every day with, there is a strong group that tries to dismiss bullying as a constant. Bullying is just something that has happened since time immemorial, unfortunate and unpleasant but something that children need to get used to, something they need to grow a thicker skin about and move on from. But clearly the people making these arguments haven’t lived through 21^st century high school as a walking target. I’m willing to venture a guess that many of them have probably never been bullied, but then again maybe they have because it can be the bullied who are least sympathetic to their fellow victims.

The reason I say this is because even though I was bullied when I was in elementary school (though never as bad as many people I know) I often find the same words I was told, and that I hated so much to hear, coming out of my mouth when talking to my sister. “Suck it up.” “Don’t let it get to you.” “Stop being such a baby.” “Just let it roll.” It’s only now that I’m realizing that these words could have, and probably did, cause as much pain as the insults, the slurs, the put downs and the rejections from the bullies.

When I was a kid I had two obvious targets for potential bullies – my weight (I’ve always been very heavy despite the fact that I have always been extremely sporty and physically active) and the fact that I come across as rather androgynous (I’ve always worn gender non-specific clothing and have had interests not traditionally associated with little girls). I’m sure you can guess some of the names I was called and the taunts shouted at me. However, I was extremely lucky. I was always quite well-liked by my classmates and there was a strong core of us who had known each other since what seemed like before we born. That I was so sporty probably also helped more than it harmed because there were very few people that wanted to take on the football team to pick on me. By the time I was in high-school bullying had mostly become a distant memory. I was comfortable in my own skin and with who I was which meant that trying to bully me would have been more or less futile.

The same can’t be said for my sister. Since she was in probably second or third grade her torment at the hands of her peers has been relentless. She didn’t have the benefit of the same kind of friend stronghold I had (I don’t even know if it’s possible to build something as good anymore) so she also had to face it utterly alone. 6 hours a day every day for the past 7 years, she has had to live in the lions den. Thanks to Facebook, MSN, cell phones etc. even the 22 hours of relative security she could have once expected have all but eroded away. My sister is one of the kindest, most loving young women I have ever met. I am so proud to have had the chance to grow up alongside her. Along with this enormous heart, she’s got quite a wit on her and a set of pipes that can rival Beyoncé (though she sounds so much more like Taylor Swift). *Note these comparisons don’t come lightly, as I am also one of her strongest critics. We couldn’t have more different personalities, but I know that I always want her on the front lines with me.

Yet despite this innate kindness, humour and strength she is torn to shreds by her peers on a daily basis. I’ve watched as she struggled, and now though I watch mostly from afar, the little glimpses of her life that I see when I go home to visit are enough to make me wish I could just bring her back with me, give her a fresh start and try to show her that there are good people in the world.

It was when she was in 7th/8^th grade that I started to really notice her change. Her beautiful smile didn’t come so easily anymore and I knew the years of “Suck it up”, “Don’t take it so personally”, “Try to blend in”, “Don’t make yourself a target then” were beginning to take their toll. Yet I couldn’t stop – I didn’t know what other advice to give, my own experience being bullied already an old memory. She started to believe that it really was her that was the problem – that she wasn’t good enough for her world (when really her world has never been good enough for her). She tried so hard to change herself to fit in – to take away the reasons others were picking on her. But for every reason she was able to take away those around her only found 10 more. She changed schools – but alone and friendless in a new school she was once again an easy target. That’s the thing with bullying – it’s impossible once you’ve been identified as a target to ever become invisible.

There is only so much anyone can take before their heart begins to harden, before kindness, even to the kindest heart, becomes an impossibility. There is only so much pain that anyone can hold in their hearts before the light in their eyes dies and before meanness becomes a matter of survival not a matter of choice.

But my sister, for the most part, has stayed so remarkably strong. Every time I see her, I always get the biggest smile and hug which for 10 seconds when she says hello can make me forget every problem I have. I think we all know that 10 seconds are more than enough time to save a life. I can’t help but wonder how many other lives she could save if only given the chance.

I can’t help but worry though how she’ll make it through the next 3 years. Now that I’ve gotten to the other side I know that life is nothing like high school – it’s not just the meek, but the freaks and geeks as well who inherit the earth. Even though I try to remind her constantly, when every day is a struggle it’s so hard to see the big picture – or even to think past the next 24 hours.

I think the worst part of this is my sister’s story is not unique. It’s not even one of the worst. They are so many young people you have not only lost their light, but their lives because someone in the second grade thought they had a silly haircut, because they are good (or bad) at maths or because someone just needed a person to pick on to make their own pain go away. This isn’t my parents bullying – this isn’t even my bullying – what kids and teens today are facing is something out of us older folks’ nightmares. Round-the-clock torment from schoolmates intent on not just pain but destruction in combination with family stresses and pressures as well as the normal strains of growing up is more than any child, teenager or human being should ever have to face.

This needs to change. First of all we need to stop telling kids to “Suck it up”. In fact that phrase should be banned. Secondly those being bullied are not the ones who are ‘wrong’. We can’t let this whole generation of young people think that there is only one way to be accepted in society. Thirdly we need a paradigm shift.

We need to recognize people not for what they are, but for who they are.

This means tossing aside the labels both that we judge others against and that we define ourselves by: pretty, ugly, fat, thin, short, tall, Catholic, Jew, geek, Muslim, Arab, WOP, nerd, Irish, gangsta, gay, straight, bi, chick, dude, freak, loser, queen bee, mean girl, jock, stoner, lady, wuss, loner, spooner.

This isn’t going to be easy – this is our entire way of categorizing people, especially in high school. But for every modicum of ease these labels bring about for people deploying them, they create one ton of lost potential, pain and humiliation. They allow people to be reduced to one aspect of themselves – something they often can’t change – and allow people to ignore all of the other parts that make us human beings such complex and wonderful creatures.

These three things are the challenges that I am placing before myself, from this moment forward. I hope that you will join me. We may not be able to change the whole world on our own, but we can do it together.