Forum Editorial: Making students’ voices heard

Especially during a global pandemic, you can’t swing a dead cat (though, especially during a global pandemic, this is not an advisable use of dead cats) without hitting an opinion.

Everyone has one, and everyone has an experience to share about how they’ve been affected, or how they’re coping, or how life is marching on — or, worse, seems to have come to a chilling standstill. Most of these are constructive, and some instructive, even if the loudest often aren’t either of those things.

However, whether constructive, instructive or merely obnoxious, nearly all those opinions about the state of things have one common thread: they come from adults.

Even in matters which affect them directly — including ones that aren’t limited to the timeframe of a pandemic — children are rarely given a voice, and even more rarely a say in the outcome of whatever decisions are being made in their name.

But decades from now, it’s their voices that will be telling the story of the COVID-19 pandemic, and their experiences that will shape the world that follows it.

In this week’s paper, you’ll find the voices of students from across Nodaway County who agreed — or in some cases, were surprised to find they’d been volunteered but participated gamely anyway — to talk with us and provide their unique perspectives on life during the pandemic.

We think their thoughts and feelings as they continue to grow through a crisis unprecedented in living memory are inherently important to record, and should hold an equally important place in the hearts and minds of the adults who routinely advocate for and make decisions about the younger members of our community.

We’re grateful that each and every school district’s administrators shared our enthusiasm for this project, and are thankful to them and the parents who helped us get in touch with the insightful, thoughtful young men and women we spoke with.

We talked to students of all age groups, from as young as 9 years old up to seniors in high school, and their comments presented in this newspaper share many qualities. But more than any other, we think readers will be struck — as we were — by one commonality that stood out above all others: compassion.

The students we spoke to, across the board, some of them knowingly and some of them probably without knowing at all, consistently showed a deep-seated understanding of the needs of others, and an honest empathy for their peers — and it seems impossible that after reading what they have to say, even the most callous of us wouldn’t feel compelled to show just a little bit of the same.

Hopefully, it’s a quality they will never grow out of.