Time – Matt Cohen and Daniel Schugurensky
“A Phoenix high school’s experiment shows that kids can prioritize and collaborate when their education is at stake. During the 2013-14 school year, Quintin Boyce, the principal of Bioscience, a public high school in Phoenix, took a portion of his discretionary budget and told students they could decide how it was spent. He set no rules, except that the projects should benefit the school community. He knew many things could go wrong, but trusted that the students were going to assign those resources with responsibility and fairness. This was a historic experiment – to the best of our knowledge, it was the first time that American high school students had used a process called participatory budgeting that we, as scholars of participatory democracy, have studied. But the Bioscience budgeting was more than history – it was an answer to the broader problem of participation.”(more)