The author of this article was involved in the organization Next Up Oregon, a group that endorses HB 3012; she is currently not involved with the organization.
First-year Owen Ahlbrecht reflected on a distinct experience as the Tigard High School student representative for the Tigard-Tualatin School District (TTSD).
During the TTSD Interim Committee, which filled a vacancy on the school board, student representatives were asked, “Who does the school board ultimately represent?”
Ahlbrecht recalled, “I just remember people not saying students as their number one focus. A lot of the answers were targeted toward how parents were feeling about and reacting to the schools … as opposed to how students felt in their day-to-day experiences.”
With such limited political influence and limited resources for community organizing for youth, lowering the voting age for school board elections to allow 16 and 17-year-olds to participate would force school board members to talk to students and tailor their policies to student needs.
Currently, the proposed Student Voice and Democracy Act (HB3012) would allow registered 16 and 17-year-olds to vote in local school board elections, giving students social capital to make sustained changes in the institutions that impact them.
Local political issues, especially those made by the school board, uniquely impact young people. Since high school students don’t have the right to vote, their voices can be underrepresented due to the disproportionate political capital that parents and other eligible adults have in the community.
Vote16USA, an organization advocating for lowering the voting age, published studies showing that skills needed to vote, such as civic knowledge, political skills and political interest, have no significant change between 16 and 18-year-olds.
In addition, 16 and 17-year-olds have multiple legal rights that they share with their 18-year-old counterparts; they can work up to 40 hours a week, pay full income tax, be tried as adults and make autonomous medical decisions about themselves.
Many counties nationwide have lowered the voting age to 16 for school board elections, such as Takoma Park in Maryland.
“This bill honors the fact that 16 and 17-year-olds generally have the same level of education that their 18-year-old voting peers have … decisions are made with the people who are impacted by those decisions,” Representative Courtney Neron, HB3012’s chief sponsor, said.
Neron said, “I see this as an extension of civics education because we know the earlier someone begins the habit of voting and engaging, the better chances there are for creating a lifelong voter. As someone who believes that our civics education is a protection of our democracy, I really want to make sure we are encouraging and increasing the ways people understand how, when and why to vote.”
Since Oregon already has many preexisting structures for lowering the voting age — such as automatic registration, pre-registration of voters who are 16 years old, paid postage for mail-in ballots, and multilingual resource options — lowering the voting age would be a logical extension.
“What I want is to make sure that the young Oregonians that we are raising in our communities understand the importance of being active in a democracy, and that it’s not a passive form of government,” Neron continues, “ I believe that when we give somebody access to the vote, it’s really a statement of making sure that we live that value of the voices of the people impacted by a decision need to be represented in how that decision is made.”
Before Neron’s career as a public servant, she was an educator at Tigard High School and recognized the remarkable decision-making capabilities students had in terms of community planning.
“Having been around high schoolers, …there is so much that our high school-aged community members are doing, and this seems like a logical next step to ensure that they also have a voice in who is making decisions about where they spend eight hours a day,” Neron states.
