Kelm

PENDLETON — Students at Sunridge Middle School in Pendleton are getting to weigh in on matters and have a say in how to improve the school.

“The Principal’s Advisory Council is something that I’ve always wanted to do,” Sunridge Principal Piper Kelm said. “Now that I’m principal, I thought it was time to make it happen.”

Kelm and Assistant Principal Jared Tesch kicked off the new initiative for the 2022-23 school year with the aim of facilitating communication between students, faculty and administration.

The council comprises 27 counselor-appointed students of Sunridge Middle School, from grades six through eight. Twice a month during lunchtime, the council meets, once among their grade-level peers and once with the principal to discuss issues and suggestions from the student body.

The goal, Kelm said, is to provide the student body with an avenue to express their voices to faculty and administration in the hopes of making school a place students and faculty want to be.

“We establish group norms across the groups and review them at the beginning of every session,” she said. “Then we just ask the kids, hey, what do these issues mean to you? How does it look for you? Different kids obviously have different perspectives, and that was the idea behind having a diverse population on the council, so that’s been successful.”

The Principal’s Advisory Council is an idea Kelm developed throughout her 28 years as an educator at Pendleton High School. A former principal would hold monthly pizza lunches, inviting different students each time to have lunch and discuss issues the students may be facing.

“I liked the idea of doing that, but with more intention,” she said. “We began holding meetings and telling the kids that their homework was to think about what they liked about school, what they didn’t like so much, or what could be improved.”

The first few meetings, Kelm said, produced a variety of results, but some popular ideas for improving school were to shift to a four-day school week, longer lunch periods or longer passing periods.

“It gives us an opportunity to talk about compromise, and that we can’t always change the things we want in life,” Kelm said. “We explained, adding break time, or taking an extra day off just shifts those hours elsewhere on the schedule, meaning staying later.”

Kelm and Tesch agreed at the onset the advisory council would have other benefits such as leadership training, real-world networking, negotiating and compromise.

“That said, we truly didn’t want this to be a popularity contest,” Kelm said. “We have leadership classes, this isn’t student council.”

Kelm reinforced that a diverse council that represented as many viewpoints from the student body as possible was essential for such a program to be successful, and so far, it’s working.

Mark Mulvihill, superintendent of the InterMountain Education Service District, which serves the Pendleton School District, commended the school district for the initiative.

“Pendleton is making a strong effort to connect with the community and improve their outreach,” he said. “One of the audiences we tend to forget is the student group. Receiving honest, authentic feedback and promoting students’ voices is strategy districts are pursuing more and more.”