Oakland high school senior encourages students to register with class on youth vote
With this year being the first year in which 16 and 17-year-olds can vote in the Oakland school board election, education leaders are on a mission to register 1,000 students across the city's school district before next month.
One high school senior is helping to lead this mission.
Abrahr Ahmed is a senior at Latitude 37.8 High School in Oakland. She has been teaching a class to juniors and seniors about the importance of the youth vote. When she learned that people her age would be able to vote in the school board election for the first time, she knew exactly what she had to do.
"I feel very excited to know that my peers could finally vote, and they seem really like eager," Ahmed told CBS News Bay Area.
She and her family founded Latitude High School, a public charter school, about four years ago. Ahmed said that making sure public charter schools stay open is a concern for her going into the election.
She added that she wants to make sure that her classmates have a voice on the future of their school.
"Charter schools should have a chance, because I think that we could learn so much more. Especially at Latitude, since they are a hands-on experience," Ahmed said.
She was able to join forces with Families in Action Quality Education, whose goal is to register as many high school students as they can before the Oct. 21 deadline.
"Voters passed this in 2020. It's now been four years. It's time for it to happen," Oakland Unified School District Board of Education President Sam Davis told CBS News Bay Area.
"I was joking that no one's going to listen to me. I'm their dad's age, right? And if I tell them to go vote... So it is really going to be students talking to other students. It will make the difference," he added.
16 and 17-year-olds in Oakland will now be able to vote this year due to the passage of Measure QQ, after gaining about 2/3rd of the vote.
"We do have two student board members on our board, but they're both legally don't count in our decision making. And so to actually have students voting in the election is really impactful," Davis said.
The Alameda County Registrar of Voters said more than 600 high school students in Oakland registered to vote next month.
And with students like Ahmed leading the way, the push to register more youth voters continues.
At Latitude High School on Thursday, about a dozen students registered to vote after participating in Ahmed's class. More of her classmates told her they would return with the necessary application materials to submit in their registration forms.
"Student leaders are dynamite. Like, they're really strong. They're not your average student. They're really on top of extracurriculars and academics and college applications," Davis said.
Ahmed shared she was born in Yemen and moved to Oakland with her family when she was about two years old. She calls Oakland her home, and is looking forward to pushing for change in her community.
She has great aspirations after graduating high school.
"There's not a lot of Arabs like me, so me becoming a biomedical engineer hopefully in the future, I would like to maybe pursue other people like me to maybe make it more diverse," Ahmed said.