Saying Goodbye to the Forum
Today the Kentucky Student Voice Team is launching The New Edu, a new youth-led education media service, and closing The Student Voice Forum. This new publication represents a significant expansion of our efforts to cover the education system from a student perspective. The New Edu will feature original writing and reporting from a team of student journalists.
Five years ago, we launched Voices From the Front: A Student Voice Forum with aspirations of recreating the ancient intellectual centers where citizens gathered to debate, discuss, and deliberate ideas. At the time, KSVT was only in our fifth year of existence; we were still making the case that students belonged in the education policy discussion. We wrote in our first post:
We hope that the Student Voice Forum will harness your expertise as a front-line observer of and participant in our school system and provide decision-makers with real-time feedback on how their decisions effect you. In amplifying and elevating student voices in this way, we also hope to more fully integrate students as partners in the work to make Kentucky schools the best they can possibly be.
With over 100 articles published since then, we can definitively say the Forum as we originally imagined it was a success. Over the course of these five years, we’ve dabbled in some original reporting and trained students to write op-eds. With The New Edu, we’ve taken the lessons we learned from those initial forays to imagine and implement a publication centered around a part-time staff of student journalists.
While this development means we will no longer be publishing new articles in this publication, the Student Voice Forum will continue on as the opinions section of The New Edu. In the coming months, most of the content published here will be accessible on the new site. We have no plans to remove the articles from Medium, so we expect those old links to be accessible for the foreseeable future.
Here’s to the many more stories we’ll share on The New Edu.