Dear Friends,
As Quaker schools consider their response to world developments and openings for conscience and witness, I’d like to share a reflection from Westfield Friends School.
2026 marks the second time Westfield Friends School middle school students have participated in the Friends Committee on National Legislation’s (FCNL) legislative priorities process – the first being in 2024. For some 8th grade students this is their second round. The FCNL process aligns with our mission as a Friends school committed to experiential learning, civic engagement and nurturing changemakers. Our three goals in this process include:
- Students learn about how faith and values inform an organization such as FCNL and its work as a lobbying organization advocating for change.
- Students experience Quaker decision making from a community member bringing a concern, to threshing, to winnowing, to worshipful discussion, to reaching sense of the meeting in making their recommendations to FCNL
- Students identify issues that matter to them as a community and as individuals and that they are willing to pursue over time
Priorities discernment process
I brought the request to take up the FCNL priority process (concern) to the MS Meeting for Business (MfB) in February. In a special advisory – all middle school grades – meeting, I introduced the four broad areas of FCNL’s “We Seek a World”. With help from teachers we reviewed with them the FCNL priorities for the 119th Congress and reminded them of their five priorities from our 2024 process. We divided them into cross-grade groups where they first discussed whether or not their priorities were included in the current FCNL list. Then they came up with five ideas for issues they care about now. In our next session, different small groups were created and the six lists of five topics were randomly redistributed. Students were asked to place each item from their list within one of the four “We Seek” categories. We used white boards for this part of the work so that we could then discuss duplicates and overlaps and whether something needed a different category. In the end there were 15 distinct issues. The student clerks of Middle School Meeting for Business will take the lists and work to discern which 5 to bring forward for approval from the MfB. It may be that they will want to present a longer list before bringing forward a final list. We will see.
For the 119th Congress WFS student priorities were:
- Promote Diplomacy to Prevent War
- Promote Universal Health Care
- End Over-Policing of Marginalized Communities
- End Poverty + Hunger and Work Toward Economic Equity
- Increase Funding for Mental Health Services and Mental Health Awareness
A few final observations
Having done this twice with Middle School students, they are challenged to understand at a deep level the priorities found under “We Seek a World Free of War”. They don’t want war. Given the current wars going on as I write and they discern, I suspect that will be one of their priorities. But for our students, the causes of war are too removed from their daily lives, in this they are privileged. Equally, they care about the environment in a distant–you’ve told me it’s important–way.
We are a place-based school focused on helping them learn to love and care for our beautiful campus, watershed, ecosystems and animals in our neighborhood and region. From our earliest grades students have studied and argued for how to save endangered creatures they care about. But from their perspective, the weather has always been crazy, clean air and water are apparently abundant, and few have ever seen a Sturgeon, Bog Turtle, or Piping Plover. It is where they are developmentally. What they do know and passionately care about are the unhoused humans they see in their communities, children who go hungry on snow days and summer vacations, family members struggling with mental health issues, first-hand knowledge of schools where they failed to thrive, people they know disappearing into the ICE gulags, and gun violence to name a few. I have learned that the teachers and I need to trust them. In the end, it’s their list, their present and their future.
Sincerely,
Dr. Margaret Haviland
Head of School
Quaker