A Two-Person School Board Youth Movement. Steve Williamson and Karen McClelland welcome Markus Ceniceros and Mikah Dyer, both of whom decided to run for school boards just after turning 18. Markus is running for a second term on the Littleton Governing Board in Avondale, AZ. And Mikah is running for the Peoria Unified District school board. Both are also going to college full-time.
Asked why he chose to run Ceniceros says, “The big reason why I decided to run for office is because I felt a void in my community, particularly we were going through the pandemic and I was personally struggling with my mental health and my sexuality and I really figured that, you know, leaders in education were not talking about these issues that young people really cared about, and I wanted to run to provide a new generation of leadership – not just for my school district, but for my area as a whole.”
Asked the same question, Dyer responds that, when he attended a school board meeting in support of a teacher who was facing some backlash and verbal attacks from board members because she was teaching about the Black Lives Matter movement in context of other social movements. As he continued to attend board meetings, he observed, “A lot of the time, the adults in the room were not acting like it.”
Commenting on the ideology that recently led his school board to reject federal funding for social workers in schools, Dyer notes, “For a number of years, and I think since Covid, we’ve seen this kind of targeted attack on public education.” As for parents’ fears of indoctrinating students, he says, “Teachers don’t have the time in the day to indoctrinate your students.”
Ceniceros adds, “Especially here in Arizona, we’ve been ground zero for this big movement to dismantle and destroy public education.” Citing a quote from a workshop he attended, Ceniceros continues, “The way I see it, public education is the last line for a community’s democracy.”