Excerpt from an article by Jerry Mintz, Internationally Known Educator, Author and Founder of the Alternative Education Resource OrganizationGovernance of schools is becoming an increasingly important issue, as educators begin to realize how crucial it is to empower the participants in any educational process.
There are currently many hundreds of schools in the United States and other countries, both private and public, which operate with varying degrees of student self-government. These take a variety of forms, including democratic vote by students and teachers, a majority vote, or consensus by students and teachers.
For the purposes of this discussion I am not including representative governments or student councils because, for the most part, they are nothing more than a sham and have very little decision making power. It is our contention that the more that the student learner can be empowered, involved in making decisions about his or her education, the more powerful that force can be toward helping them to take true responsibility for their own education. I feel that it is possible to set up such a decision-making process almost anywhere, and that all participants should have safeguards in that process.
In a true democratic process, decisions are made by using all the creative forces and all the authority of the many participants who are involved in making those decisions. To the extent that they are disempowered by special groups having veto power, to that extent is the authority and the creative power of the total body eroded.
When we founded Shaker Mountain school, in 1968, it was set up as a democratic school, with the encouragement of the then-Commissioner of Education of the state, Harvey Scribner. Students were even the majority of our board of trustees. We did this because Scribner had said we needed to have the people we could trust the most on our board of trustees (rather than those who could raise the most money), to make decisions that would be best for the school. We felt that the ones we could trust the most would be the students, themselves. Throughout the years, all important decisions were made by the school meeting, with all students participating. When particular items were brought to the board of trustees, invariably the student trustees, the majority, would refer these decisions back to the school meeting, feeling that it was the proper forum for making any decision.
Those decisions even included such major issues as buying and selling buildings, the organization of major funding events, and all basic school policies. I feel that the procedures which were developed for the school meeting at Shaker Mountain, created the most effective school self government that I've ever seen, having visited several hundred alternative schools, including Summerhill, in England, which was the pioneer in this process.
In the earliest years, decisions were made by a straight majority. Our meetings were always long and sometimes emotional because the real decisions operating the school were made in the meeting. It's always seemed to me that schools that reserve their meeting time for "Wednesday afternoon for one hour" couldn't really be democratic because there are so many more decisions to be made during the week. We often had meetings that lasted the entire Monday morning and Friday morning, sometimes spilling over into the afternoons. In addition, we had meetings for class announcements every morning during the week, which often had other decisions brought into them. Special meetings could be called by any staff or student by ringing the meeting bell. I feel that this latter feature was very important because it wasn't necessary for someone to get permission to call a meeting or for a particular person to go around the school rounding up people for a meeting. If the meeting bell rang, there was a meeting, and the meeting bell was considered rather sacred around the school. In fact, if anyone ever rang the meeting bell when there wasn't a meeting, there was an automatic meeting on that person "for calling a meeting when there wasn't one." But this probably didn't happen more than a handful of times in 17 years.
In the following sections, I will outline the decisions governing the meeting as they evolved at Shaker Mountain School, however, I think it is important to point out that the meeting system is really more of an art than a science, and like all democracies, it is fragile and depends very much upon the respect it is given by the constituents. If at some point people begin to feel that they are not really the ones making the decisions, attendance and participation and creative energy fall off, not unlike the apathy manifested recently in national elections. On the other hand when people feel that they have important decisions to make, attendance is high.
Continued...
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Penne Ard 
2008 Some Rights Reserved. The author is a nontraditional homeschool mom and Founder/Facilitator of The Secret CO-OP Model Learning Centre at Powerful Intentions. Permission to make and distribute copies of the full text of this article should be obtained directly from Jerry Mintz. Usage guidelines for the accompanying graphic may be found at LuckyOliver.com. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in the article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Founders College administration, faculty, or students.
2008 Some Rights Reserved. The author is a nontraditional homeschool mom and Founder/Facilitator of The Secret CO-OP Model Learning Centre at Powerful Intentions. Permission to make and distribute copies of the full text of this article should be obtained directly from Jerry Mintz. Usage guidelines for the accompanying graphic may be found at LuckyOliver.com. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in the article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Founders College administration, faculty, or students.
