If I were to give one piece of advice from my experience so far, it would be this: find trustworthy people to volunteer to sign kids up. If you’re a member of Student Council of National Honor Society or the Key Club or anything else along those lines, work out a deal with the advisor. Tell him or her about the petition and ask if students in the club can earn hours by volunteering to help others sign. This holds several benefits. The first is obviously that the petition will be affiliated with an organization at your school, thus making it more credible in the eyes of the faculty and students. Also, if you need anything copied or printed up, you can always ask your club advisor. I saved about $30 at Kinko’s just by asking my NHS advisor if she could copy fliers, volunteer passes and actual petition sheets. Thirdly, and most importantly, you will have student volunteers. The way my school’s petition is set up, the drive runs for four days. On the first, (Monday), Our Education volunteers will go to different tables in the cafeteria during lunch periods with petition slips and gum, asking students to sign. I have really great friends who feel comfortable doing this, but a lot of your volunteers understandably may not, so service hours as an incentive will come in handy. The other three days of my school’s petition drive, OurEd volunteers will have tables set up where students can just stop by and sign. Sitting at these tables is boring. No one likes doing it. Offer people service hours, and they will.

Through my anxieties about the week of the petition drive, I really have faith that it will be a success. My goal for the drive is a thousand signatures, which is modest in a school with an 1,800 person enrollment. I really want people to ask questions about the petition and about what Our Education is trying to accomplish. And I want people to talk at their lunch tables about their experiences in our school district and how they could be improved. And I don’t just mean complaining about parking spaces or the dress code. I want kids to talk about federal money and textbooks and class sizes and how these things affect them and their siblings and their friends and their siblings’ friends. And I want them to enjoy the gum that we hand out when they sign the petition. I am terrified that I will buy gum that no one likes.