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Fiore: Hard work is worth it.
As Anthony Fiore finishes up his two-year term as a Board of Education student representative, his final tasks include finding another brave student leader to succeed him.
Fiore, 18, is a senior at High School in the Community. He reflected on his pandemic-era term serving as a student representative for the Board of Education.
His term ends this school year.
Fiore began his term on the board as a rising junior in 2020 in hopes of learning more about local government and getting experience in leading.
“My goal is to be a part of solution,” Fiore said during an interview.
Like his predecessors, Fiore found that even though he couldn’t officially vote as a board member, he could have a major role in solutions to challenges, such as figuring out pandemic-learning policy and stocking schools with drinking water.
Recently Fiore visited all of HSC’s tenth-grade classes and promoted the student representative position.
“We can help each other,” Fiore recalled telling the sophomores.
Due to the big responsibility of representing thousands of students, finding a willing student leader is “kind of like finding a diamond on the rough” he said.
While visiting the classes. Fiore told students of to the basic requirements of the student representative role. He offered three observations:
• The “responsibility is massive.”
• “A lot of opportunities will be presented to you.”
• “You’ll meet a lot of new people and friends.”
So far Fiore has heard back from several students considering a run.
In addition to being a member of the Board of Ed, Fiore works as a counselor and tutor for Leadership, Education and Athletics in Partnership, Inc. (LEAP) program housed at Family Academy of Multilingual Exploration (FAME). And he’s the vice present of HSC’s student council.
In his role at LEAP, Fiore tutors local students aged 7 to 12 years old. His job has helped him to hear to the concerns of middle school students in addition to his high school peers he regularly sees.
The past two years have been Fiore’s busiest in high school, between balancing SAT prep and Advanced Placement (AP) courses his senior year, SATs his senior year, and working at LEAP every day of the week.
When Mondays come around, Fiore spends his day in school asking students about their insights, then goes over the board’s materials and cleans his room to have a clean Zoom background for the meeting.
In his role he has also helped to run the board’s monthly citywide student council meetings, which bring together dozens of student council leaders throughout the school district. Most recently the council meeting saw 50 students participate. The meetings “give a platform to students” and provides students with opportunities, he said.
As the senior student rep, Fiore has also spent his term showing second board student rep Ma’Shai Roman, a junior at Hillhouse High School, the ropes for running the citywide council.
During his term Fiore has spoken up in board meetings about students’ concerns with the lack of access to water fountains, increases in school violence, school security measures, mental health resources, access to healthy food, and the complexity of students’ home lives.
He is also an advocate of offering students with remote learning options for a variety of reason including Covid concerns. “The more options we have is better,” he said
Fiore is considering a near full-ride acceptance to the University of Connecticut with an interest in majoring in political science next year.
He plans to get into local government in New Haven to lead, “make change through policy,” and be an activist, he said.
Fiore credits HSC’s teaching model and opportunities focused on student leadership for his success thus far.
“Its [HSC] impact was like a domino effect from student council to the board,” he said.
Fiore first heard about the position on the board after joining HSC’s student council.
He recalled the start of his term in 2020 and immediately being thrown into helping the board to decide whether to reopen schools or stick with remote learning.
“These were hard decisions I was faced with from day one,” he recalled. “I didn’t know what else to do but ask my friends.”
The first days of joining the board for student reps is one thing Fiore would like to see improved he said.
He described feeling like he was “thrown into it,” which in the start left him to figure out his role, abilities on the board, and the resources available to him.
He said he didn’t get access to the Board of Education email account until the second half of his term, which by then had accumulated 700 messages.
The hardest part of being a student representative for Fiore was the pressure of representing thousands of New Haven students.
During his first half of the term last year, Fiore said, he struggled with getting in touch with students because of the remote learning requirements. He resorted to social media connections.
“I wish I had my full two years in person,” he said. “Covid stole away a whole year of my term.”
Fiore suggested the student rep position be increasingly advertised in schools by the district so the representatives can be more accessible to students.
“Students need to know who’s representing them,” he said.
Fiore critiqued the board’s policy of not counting the student representatives’ votes in the official tally.
“The student vote would drastically change everything,” he said. He said he would like to see the student representatives’ vote counted in the future.