Education leaders frequently tout student voices as critical when making education policy. The District of Columbia’s State Board of Education (SBOE) includes student experiences and reflections in decisionmaking. Not only does the board of education have a fully voting student member (found in only six other states), but the board sponsors a Student Advisory Committee (SAC) of high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors that it is required to consult before passing resolutions. In addition to meeting at least once a month during the school year, the SAC compiles an annual report on issues and recommendations that are important to District public school students.

For the 2025–26 school year, the four high school seniors who lead the SAC, and the SBOE staff members who facilitate the committee, requested support in their goal to ground this year’s recommendations in data-driven research that students conducted themselves. The SAC asked the DC Education Research Collaborative to advise and guide students through original data collection on issues that matter to them and their peers. The Collaborative, a research-practice partnership that convenes researchers and decisionmakers to improve student experiences and outcomes across DC schools, recruited researchers with expertise in youth-led research from the Urban Institute, Georgetown University, and the University of the District of Columbia to support the process.

We used a youth participatory action research (YPAR) framework to steer this partnership. Throughout the school year, we worked with the 147 high school student members of the SAC to define research questions, design data collection strategies, launch surveys and conduct interviews, analyze data, integrate the quantitative and qualitative findings into actionable policy recommendations, and disseminate their work to the SBOE and other education policy experts across DC. YPAR teaches young people how to ask questions and collect and analyze data to create change within their communities. This approach recognizes students’ unique expertise and perspectives and empowers them to be researchers instead of just a data source.

In our case, students led and designed the SAC research projects. Students self-selected into groups of 20 to 30 based on topics of interest. Each group had a student leader, who set project goals, approved agendas, and participated in all planning meetings. We met biweekly with the student leaders, alternating between planning and debriefing, and frequently asked them for their reflections on the process and feedback on our facilitation. In YPAR, university- or institution-based researchers work alongside young people as part of a collaborative research team and often function as advisers, research assistants, and project managers. We gathered input from SAC leaders to assess their experience of this collaborative process. The description of the issues, and the recommendations that follow, are all in the students’ own words and voice. (The student leaders also reviewed this article.)

Topics and Research Questions

Inspired by their experiences as DC students, SAC members developed research questions to address urgent policy issues they’ve observed in their schools and communities. SAC student researchers set the full research agenda, with topics on college and life readiness, school safety, and mental health. (Several students also chose to do individual projects, which we facilitated as well.)

College and Life Readiness 

College and career preparedness equips students with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed after high school. This allows students to explore different career options, enroll in college, or find a good job that pays a living wage. SAC members observed firsthand how existing college and career programming does not sufficiently prepare students for the next step after graduation, and disparities between different schools and wards create uneven preparedness across DC.

Research questions:

1. How do accessibility and usage of college and career readiness resources vary across wards and schools?
2. What does readiness mean to students at different schools and across different wards?
3. How do demographics affect how prepared students feel for college or a career?

School Safety

Physical and emotional safety is fundamental to student well-being and academic success. To assess and potentially revamp existing school safety policies, SAC members wanted to understand what makes students feel safe or unsafe at their schools, learn more about individual schools’ safety policies (e.g., presence of school resource officers or security guards, cell phone policies), and determine whether these policies make students feel safer both on campus and during their commutes to and from school. 

Research question:

1. What makes students feel safe and unsafe at school?

Mental Health  

SAC members noticed an increase in the number of DC students struggling with their mental health while balancing schoolwork, extracurriculars, jobs, and social lives. Mental health professionals, counselors, and other school-based mental health supports are intended to improve students’ emotional well-being, but SAC members noted that students were often not taking advantage of these resources because they were unhelpful or difficult to access. SAC members were inspired to research students’ perceptions of the quality and accessibility of mental health resources available to them, as well as their experiences and reflections accessing these supports so that students can get the support they need to succeed. 

Research questions:

1. What mental health resources are currently available to students?
2. What barriers exist (real or perceived) between students and available resources?
3. What experiences do students have with mental health support?

Data Collection and Analysis

By design, the YPAR model relies on students’ expertise in how to effectively gather and meaningfully interpret data on issues relevant to their lives and communities. YPAR requires students themselves to generate evidence-based recommendations that improve their lives, schools, and communities. Under this framework, we served as the students’ research assistants. They were the experts, and our role was to make it easier for them to collect and analyze the data they needed to answer their research questions. For example, the student researchers told us what questions they wanted to include in their surveys, and we coded the survey instruments into survey software. At their direction, we created websites and flyers to disseminate the survey. They developed interview guides, and we helped them recruit and schedule respondents and guided them through the informed consent process. Students designed the protocols for document reviews and tasked us with gathering available materials for analysis. They posted about the surveys on social media, passed around flyers with QR codes at their schools, shared the surveys with their teachers and school leaders, and presented about their research at other clubs and extracurricular activities. Each survey received around 200 responses across DC public schools and public charter schools.

After we had collected data, we supported the students through their data analysis. We combined and disaggregated data according to their instructions, created data visualizations at their request, facilitated discussions as they identified trends and made inferences, and guided them through writing evidence-based conclusions and actionable recommendations.   

Recommendations

The SAC made the following recommendations to the SBOE on June 3, 2026:

College and Career Readiness 

• Consider a “scale‑up” approach to college and career preparation. 
• Make college and career fairs and workshops more common and accessible. 
• Make sure advanced opportunities are varied, available, and accessible. 
• Increase professional development for teachers focused on the college application process to effectively support students. 

School Safety 

• Reevaluate the board’s stance on the policy banning cell phones. 
• Ensure school safety policies apply to teachers and students. 
• Actively and frequently assess teachers and school staff members to ensure they do not pose any safety concerns to students. 
• Offer more information and transparency around safety policies directly to students, and communicate clearly and quickly following any incidents. 

Mental Health 

• Facilitate lessons for students on mandating reporting. 
• Obtain more clarity on the ways different referral processes actually work, and facilitate lessons for students on available resources and how to access them. 
• Increase students’ trust in the available supports at school. 
• Understand the differences in awareness, trust, and needs for resources for students in different grades and genders. 
• Take a preventive approach to mental health issues, and make mental health support an ongoing strategy, not a series of one-time, disconnected activities.

Lessons Learned

Follow the students’ lead. The goal of YPAR is to build student’s skills and research expertise, not to conduct the research for them or on them. This means adult researchers must allow students to guide the process, defer to their ideas and suggestions, and minimize their own role in data analysis. Through these collaborative relationships, we listened significantly more than we talked. 

Make the process interactive and personalized. We printed copies of the research reports, survey results, and figures and let the students mark their papers with questions, clarification points, and edits. We often split the research teams into smaller groups or pairs to allow the student researchers to have the opportunity to share their perspectives and thoughts. 

Stay organized and on track. SAC is just one of many extracurricular activities that DC students are involved in, and one role of the adult YPAR facilitator is project management. We kept track of ongoing activities and due dates, reminded students of the timeline and goals, and took care of administration so they could focus on research. We stayed organized and on track by having reasonable expectations of students’ bandwidth to do work outside of meetings and adjusting timelines accordingly. 

Make it fun! It’s important to make room for socializing. We ended the school year honoring the student researchers’ hard work and accomplishments and celebrated the graduating seniors.