School board welcomes two student reps
SCHENECTADY — Zohanna Nizrudin attended her first school board meeting as a new student representative on Board of Education on the same night earlier this month that the district named Carlos Cotto Jr. as its new superintendent.
And even before she took her seat on the dais, Nizrudin, a Schenectady High School senior, stood alongside board members during the March 6 announcement.
Joyce Akhelume, junior and the alternate student rep, was also up front with school leaders during the news conference. Akhelume, who will participate in one meeting a month, will assume the role full time once Nizrudin graduates in June, according to district officials.
The pair — the first ever in the school system to hold the student rep title on the board — are nonvoting members and do not attend executive, or closed, sessions, but will instead be excused no later than 8:30 p.m. to allow them time to study and complete their schoolwork.
The 17-year-old Nizrudin is excited for the opportunity to be the voice for young people.
“The word representative stuck out to me, being able to be that voice for other people especially students, and I love that that I’m a student representative,” she said during a recent interview.
The teen plans to visit district elementary and middle schools in hopes of soliciting input from students as well as teachers about issues they would like to see the board address.
“I want (students) to know that they have me to talk to about anything, and I won’t hesitate to put in a report, I will bring it up to the board even if you think it may be crazy or nonsensical, I’m going make it sense of it and bring it up to the board, she said.
Two issues already on her radar that she conceded are both complex are the lengthy suspensions
imposed on students and what she described as hall checks at the high school.
With the latter, she explained, that after the bell rings, students have three minutes to get to their class before hall sweeps are conducted and penalties meted out. Anyone caught during the sweep who does not have hall pass can be disciplined after multiple infractions, added Nizrudin.
Another issue that has come up in conversations is that some Spanishspeaking students sometimes have problems navigating the high school and feel lost. She plans on asking school leaders to consider
having Spanishspeaking faculty and staff wear a lanyard of a certain color so those students can easily identify them and ask for help or directions to get to their destination.
She and Akhelume also plan on holding Student Speak Out sessions at the high during lunch hours.
Born in the the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao, Nizrudin spent her formative years living with her family in Guyana and neighboring Surinam in South America when saw people struggling to scratch out a living. They later came to the United States. She’s been accepted to Russell Sage College
and wants to become an anesthesiologist.
Board President Bernice Rivera said the idea of having a student voice on the board is one that’s been talked about for a while.
“One of the things that we were really vocal about is that we wanted students that have a variety of different skills, not necessarily the prototype of what you see in a lot of boards, we wanted the student to be diverse in the different skills that they have,” she said.
She said High School Principal Dennis Green put out an application on various platforms and also spoke directly to a diverse group of prospective candidates. The application, which included a question of why the student was interested in sitting on the board, was also available on the district website.
Rivera said the roughly 15 students who responded were first interviewed by Superintendent Anibal Soler Jr. and other top administrators, among others. She was part of a second round of informal interviews after the field had been whittled down to about a half-dozen prospects.
From there, it was cut in half, and the plan was to keep all three candidates, but one is moving out of the district.
“Based on what I knew our board was looking for and based on what we know that comes up at the board meetings in terms of questions and discussions, those were some of the things that we were looking for in terms of the skill sets for the students, and someone that’s going to be very vocal and that’s going to speak on behalf of the students,” said Rivera.
She said that Nizrudin and Akhelum stood out from the others because “they had many ideas about how to move student voice forward,” which she and the others on the board value.
Rivera said she also held a one-on-one orientation with the two teens and also give them a condensed handbook “that’s applicable to our students.”