By Julia Steiny

Xilian Sansoucy was hungry for leadership opportunities when she began her freshman year at Classical High School, an exam school in Providence. “I think it’s exhilarating to present” in public, she said. A friend pulled her into an organization called Young Voices (YV) which specializes in just that, nurturing student leadership. In collaboration with other student organizations, leaders from YV increasingly make themselves known and heard around the state, advocating for issues they’ve agreed are important. Sansoucy took to YV like the proverbial duck to water.

Young Voices’ training begins with gathering their new recruits into student-led workshops where they research a question and share their discoveries. In one of these exercises, Sansoucy’s research on school discipline strategies revealed stark, even startling, differences between discipline at her old school, a private independent, and her new one, very much a public school. She explains that as an Asian-American, she chose Classical for its student diversity and “to get opened up to the real world.” Part of that real world is Classical’s traditional discipline system that relies primarily on suspensions and detention to control behavior.

via Student Advocates for Better Discipline, Restorative Practices.