Youth Leadership
The student trustee who ran on clean washrooms
Jay Xu was elected Student Trustee at a school board of 67,000+ students on a promise to fix school washrooms, and his campaign has since drawn 180+ student submissions and roughly 1,000+ census responses across 20+ schools.
After two weeks of campaigning and 4,000 votes cast, Jay Xu was elected Student Trustee, a role in which he can advocate and act for students at the school board level. He was elected, he says, because students shared his view of school washrooms, "a place where vapers gather during breaks with terrible hygiene, the exact issue I promised to fix in my campaign."
The board has 67,000+ students. He cares about the issue, he says, because "no students deserve to have to hold their basic needs in until they get home to use the washroom, simply because those at school are intentionally vandalized and congested to be unusable."
“Students deserve a voice in decisions that shape their education, just as they deserve something as fundamental as clean washrooms in schools.”
Jay Xu
Over the past year the White Oaks Secondary School student has pushed for policy changes at his board through a campaign built on a board-wide multimedia competition, data collection and a proposed new washroom monitoring system. The competition received 180+ submissions of artworks, posters, videos and more from students of all grades. Roughly 1,000+ responses came in through a student census on washrooms across 20+ schools, and a QR code reporting system has been implemented at 3 schools. "However, this is far from enough," he says.
The washrooms are not the whole job. With a group of students known as Student Senators, and with the Halton Learning Foundation, he says they have raised close to 40k to support students in need, delivered a delegation at a town council defending free transportation, and hosted board-wide workshops on the move from Grade 8 into high school. As a core member of OSTA-AECO, the Ontario Student Trustees' Association, he has relayed the thoughts of students at his board into the organisation's open letters to Ontario's Ministry of Education on Bill 33 and Bill 101.
Then there is Grandparents' Diary. He has volunteered at a local senior home weekly since 2023 and is now the organisation's Vice-President. Members host weekly poetry sessions at senior homes, and more recently have started making documentaries with the seniors in their sessions, shared online and with their close ones. The purpose is companionship, and using creative writing to help prevent and ease dementia. The aim, he says, is "maximizing the evidence that they once lived in this world, and the unique stories they have to tell."