Third-Graders Put Democracy Into Practice

The grade school students slurped from juice boxes and munched on chips Tuesday as they experienced a taste of democracy.

“We have to work on the problem of the bathrooms--they’re dirty and messy,” Nick Snavely, 9, told the gathering of third-graders at Moorpark’s Peach Hill Elementary School.

“We’ve been having a lot of fighting, and we shouldn’t have it,” said Austin Olinyk, 9. “There’s also been a ton of bad language.”

“I think the rules should be posted somewhere on the playground,” Mark Cyffka, 9, added.

As members of the school’s first third-grade student council, the group of 12 students will meet each week until the end of the school year to talk about issues important to Peach Hill third-graders and help plan the school’s graduation ceremony.

Tuesday, at the group’s first meeting, Peach Hill Principal Carlos Pagan passed out an agenda and told them all to take notes. They would be expected to tell their homeroom classmates how the meeting went. The council will give Pagan a way to keep his finger on the pulse of the student body at the kindergarten through third-grade school. “We need to see things through their eyes,” he said. “Sometimes, we get away from that.”

As useful as the group may be to school administrators, the idea for it came from a student. Mark Cyffka said he first pitched to Pagan the idea of electing a class president, and the council grew out of their discussion.

“I’ve always been interested in presidents, and since I liked them so much, I wondered why we didn’t have one here,” he said at Tuesday’s meeting. “I’d like to see us come up with ideas to make the place better.”

After Mark came up with the concept, other students started volunteering, Pagan said. In the end, some of the school’s homeroom classes elected representatives to the council, while in others teachers picked students.

The council’s first meeting opened with a brainstorming session, as students rattled off problems that needed to be addressed, including the bathrooms, the fighting and the playground rules.

The council took no action on those items Tuesday, other than writing them down for future discussion. They also picked people to lead upcoming meetings, serve as treasurer and take minutes.