Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE) is a youth organizing collaborative for education justice led by students of color from 7 community organizations and 8 Chicago Public High Schools working in concert with them, including:

• Albany Park Neighborhood Council | Roosevelt High School
• Brighton Park Neighborhood Council | Kelly High School
• Organization of the NorthEast | Senn High School and Uplift Community High School
• Kenwood Oakland Community Organization | Dyett High School
• Logan Square Neighborhood Association | Kelvyn Park High Schools
• Target Area Development Corporation | Perspectives Calumet Leadership Academy
• Southwest Organizing Project | Gage Park High School

VOYCE builds on these community based organizations’ histories of organizing both parents and students around school reform issues such as creating a policy change granting in-state tuition for undocumented students, securing the construction of new schools to relieve overcrowding, developing schools as community learning centers, and more.

Since its formation in 2007, VOYCE has worked towards increasing Chicago’s graduation rate by using youth-driven research and organizing to advance district-level policies that support student achievement. All of VOYCE’s work is driven by the belief that young people, who are most directly affected by issues of educational inequity, must be the ones to develop meaningful, long-lasting solutions. To lay the foundation for VOYCE’s campaign, over a hundred youth conducted an in-depth, year-long Participatory Action Research (PAR) study on the root causes of the city’s 50% graduation rate. In order to increase graduation rates, they found that CPS must build a foundation for student success through district-level policies and school-level practices that: foster trusting and supportive relationships with peers and school staff, establish the sense of purpose that comes from high expectations and academic engagement, and emotional and physical safety. VOYCE’s campaign focuses on three key policy recommendations aimed at pressuring Chicago Public Schools to shift spending from the enforcement of zero tolerance and towards policies and practices that boost student success:

Strengthen the social-emotional support systems needed to foster strong peer-to-peer and student-staff relationships, particularly in freshman year. At the heart of school culture change is the importance of trusting and supportive relationships within the school. To develop and strengthen these relationships, student leaders successfully organized to bring in over $200,000 in CPS funding for a pilot project at eight partner high schools that aims to increase social-emotional supports for struggling freshmen. Since its launch in the 2009-10 school year, VOYCE has engaged over 700 freshmen and 250 older peer mentors in peer mentoring, youth-led retreats, and personalized graduation planning, and successfully impacted attitudes, relationships, and attendance rates. VOYCE is currently working with CPS senior officials to further institutionalize and scale up the initiative throughout the city.

Ensure the emotional and physical safety of all students by ending the use of harsh discipline policies. In early 2011, VOYCE began working with Advancement Project on a cost-analysis study investigating CPS’s continued spending on harsh, zero tolerance-based discipline policies that have contributed to high dropout and incarceration rates and resulted in the drastic underfunding of effective approaches to increasing school safety and student achievement. To collect student stories and build a broader base of support for their findings, student leaders held a cross-city youth forum on April 15, where acting Chief Education Officer Charles Payne offered his support and feedback for VOYCE’s recommendation. Moving forward, VOYCE will use these findings to advance its goal of limiting the use of suspensions, arrests and other harsh disciplinary measures. Specifically, VOYCE is organizing for a re-write of the Student Code of Conduct, the creation of a public database on the use of discipline, and increased investment in social-emotional supports, high-quality teaching and learning, and other research-based models of preventing and responding to misconduct