Peri Stone-Palmquist, LSMW, MPP, first learned about the Student Advocacy Center as a newspaper reporter. But, after meeting the founding executive director, Ruth Zweifler, and hearing her stories, Stone-Palmquist knew she had to get involved. More than twenty years later, she serves as the co-executive director of the organization.
Founded in 1975, the Student Advocacy Center of Michigan, formed over concern about school suspensions and expulsions disproportionately impacting underserved children. Their mission today is largely the same as it was back then: get students back in school and provide them and their caregivers with the resources to stay there. “We believe education is a right and every child is worthy of a quality education,” said Stone-Palmquist.
The students the Student Advocacy Center works with face barriers like homelessness, foster care, child abuse and neglect, trauma and disabilities. Stone-Palmquist explained that, in these situations, “parents want the best for their kid, and that can feel really hard to figure out.” The Student Advocacy Center can help through their statewide student rights helpline, which allows caregivers to call and speak to a team member who can assess the situation and provide helpful resources. From there, the Student Advocacy Center will connect the caller with a short-term advocate, or a mentor who will have weekly one-on-one meetings with the student. The Student Advocacy Center also has countless resources on their website, as well as youth organizers, who help students to create change in their own communities.
“Our team is really, really focused on building a relationship,” Stone-Palmquist said. Their trained mentors prioritize “giving space [for students] to reflect and think about what they want for their own lives, and giving them the steps to get there.”
For example, they can help students understand if they have a disability and how it can be accommodated. This knowledge helps students “graduate high school, go on to sustain themselves, and get a job.” Stone-Palmquist also shared a story about a high school senior who got removed from their foster care placement two weeks before the end of the school year. “We paid for an Airbnb so they could graduate,” Stone-Palmquist recalled, proud that the Student Advocacy Center was able to be “that one consistent voice” for that student.
The Student Advocacy Center’s impact includes an increase in attendance and grades, and a decrease in disciplinary experiences. “We know that so many of our young people, and frankly parents, feel isolated. We hear so consistently that [because of the Student Advocacy Center] they didn’t feel alone, and I think that matters,” Stone-Palmquist said.
The Student Advocacy Center also works on policy. They were able to overturn the Zero Tolerance policy in Michigan, which got rid of forced expulsions. Last year, there were no expulsions in Washtenaw traditional public schools at all. Stone-Palmquist is excited that “there have been some shifts in understanding how damaging it is to exclude kids from school.”
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Currently, the Student Advocacy Center is trying to address the difficulty public schools have with hiring enough staff and supporting them. “We’re underfunding public education by over 5 billion, so we need to get serious,” Stone-Palmquist urged. One way they are working to invest more in public schooling is by supporting the ballot proposal, Invest in Mi Kids. The proposal involves taxing the highest percent income workers and reserving that money exclusively for local school districts.
Stone-Palmquist also shared the Student Advocacy Center’s frustration that, nowadays, “certain districts are quick to assign children to asynchronous virtual school, and not just for disciplinary reasons.” These children miss out on socialization, access to food and better opportunities to learn. “Most of us lived through the pandemic,” she said, “and I could see how hard it was for my own children to achieve in a virtual environment. There’s no consequence for districts doing that, and children feel really stuck.” Stone-Palmquist explained that “it’s a symptom of not enough school funding and teachers, and it’s causing an enormous amount of harm and damage in communities.”
Despite these challenges, Stone-Palmquist and the Student Advocacy Center team stay positive. “There are so many amazing young people, and that’s what inspires us to keep going, because we have seen what happens when they get support,” Stone-Palmquist shared.
If you want to support these students, you can attend their annual storytelling event on May 15. “In a time that feels really divided, pausing to listen to each other and connect with each other, just showing up and having conversations, is super important,” Stone-Palmquist said of the event. You can also volunteer for Invest in Mi Kids, or support the Student Advocacy Center directly.
