After board meetings in Manchester, Vermont, members file out of the squat Town Hall and quietly return to their lives as teachers, store owners, Little League coaches, home makers—and now high school students.

In this small town, nestled into the valley between the Taconic Range and the Green Mountains, all of the boards and commissions have grown a little larger and a little younger in the past year. In a unique partnership with the local high school, Burr & Burton Academy, and the Foundation, the Town of Manchester appointed high school students to serve on the Planning Commission, Design Review Board, Development Review Board, Parks & Recreation Committee, Conservation Commission, Tree Committee, and the Mark Skinner Library Board. Students serve as full voting members on all but two of the boards which, for legal reasons, do not allow minors to vote. Students attend meetings, read up on the issues, comment on proposals and town issues, and make their voices heard.

“At first I was a little scared to express my opinion,” Burr & Burton senior Charlotte Hogan says of her first year on the Development Review Board. “Now, however, I am very excited to have a voice.” At a recent meeting, while discussing a site plan review, Hogan spoke up and proposed a solution about balancing green space that Manchester Town Planner Lee Krohn calls “a simple change that’s going to be important and valuable.” Hogan’s fellow board members and the applicant all agreed that her suggestion would improve the plan, and she relished the moment. “The adults on the board turned to look at me,” Hogan recalls, “and [seemed to think], ‘Why didn't I think of that?’”

Discussing the intricacies of village sign regulations may seem like some teenagers’ worst nightmare, but Hogan notes that her experiences on the Development Review Board have helped her to see her community in a different way. “Everyone knows about Shaw’s [grocery store], Eastern Mountain Sports, and the Village Picture Show, but the little businesses like lawyers and art studios and yarn shops often go unnoticed,” Hogan says, “It is so rewarding to see signs you have approved go up, and to see building changes you approved happen.”

On Manchester’s newly-created Energy Commission, students see community issues dovetailing with their coursework and with causes that matter on campus. But while most of their classmates were hanging out with friends or doing homework, students appointed to the Commission spent a recent weeknight downtown completing an audit of the lights and electricity usage. On the Parks & Recreation Committee, which included one youth member even before the program started, students have the chance to help plan for the Recreation Center and the many activities it sponsors—an aspect of town life that matters most to teenagers.

Student board members were also asked to share their opinions in a broader forum this winter. The Council on the Future of Vermont is in the midst of a statewide series of visioning forums, and project staff members met with the Manchester student board representatives for a special session in January. While students discussed many of the same values (friendliness, rural character, environmental stewardship) that pop up at other forums throughout the State, they also noted some distinct challenges and benefits for youth growing up in a rural state and in the Town of Manchester, including the rare opportunity they have to influence decisions in their community.

The project is now reaching the one year mark, with high school seniors graduating and a new cohort of students applying for the chance to spend their weeknights discussing the nuances of zoning setbacks and design standards. Krohn says that feedback from the Town’s adult board members and from the community has been uniformly positive. “I haven’t heard a single comment from anyone in the community suggesting this isn’t a good idea,” he says. In 2008 and 2009, the program will develop further to include more robust training, opportunities for the students to speak at conferences and network with other youth leaders, and the establishment of a broader youth engagement initiative—the Manchester Youth Commission.

While many communities have some type of youth forum or have students participating directly in municipal government, few communities have both. When Manchester’s program was first conceptualized, an exploratory committee of students, town employees, teachers, and interested citizens all agreed that it was important to have selected students serve as members of Town boards, but also to create an open forum in which any local youth could bring up concerns and become involved in local issues. A local foundation has contributed seed money that the Manchester Youth Commission, once formed, can use to make grants or fund projects addressing the issues that are important to students.

Manchester is far from the only community engaging students in local government. Within Vermont, Burlington’s Youth On Boards program has approximately ten students serving on City boards and commissions; Montpelier recently added youth to its Planning Commission; and both state and local school boards have long included student members. Beyond the Green Mountains, well-established youth planning or engagement programs include the San Francisco Youth Commission; Toronto’s InvolveYouth program and Youth Cabinet; and the Hampton, Virginia, Youth Commission, one of only a handful of communities in the country to employ high school students as staff planners in the City’s Planning Department. The National League of Cities works to connect groups across the country through an online directory and by inviting youth delegates to its two national conferences each year.

Planning is not the only discipline to embrace youth participation either, but it is a discipline that inherently thinks across generations. Young adults across the country are abandoning rural areas for college or the excitement of city life and the towns they leave behind are rapidly aging. Programs like Manchester’s may allow youth to become more connected to their home towns, but they may also help the community become more livable and appealing to young people. “Ultimately planning is about how to make sure the future is better than the present,” says Krohn. “It is our future, but it is their future too.”

Rebecca Sanborn Stone is a Senior Communications Associate with the Orton Family Foundation. She has been involved in youth engagement and education as an environmental educator, a high school teacher and an adjunct professor. She lives in Bethel, Vermont with her husband.