410 minutes in one school day times the 720 days we are required to be in school. That’s 295,200 minutes. When we decided to create this special issue, we knew we wanted to highlight specific student narratives—the moments in these hundreds of thousands of minutes that cause us to pause, and think about what we’ve learned.

We’ve seen efforts at a local, state and national level when it comes to anything and everything impacting our education: whether that’s the 100+ bills in this legislative session or a shift in MHS’ direction with Professional Learning Communities. All these forms of policy have an effect on our education and the people we become in these various moments in time. But through all these impacts, Crier retains one goal: education should encourage critical thinking. Learning is not just memorization, but application—the shift towards PLCs reflects this, but we also published this issue to reflect on student involvement in education. While it is impossible to cater to each individual student, student ownership of learning cannot exist without that constant cycle of communication. In the same vein, we cannot continue to put pressure on the teachers who advise us without asking about their needs.

Though high school, in the end, is just four years of a student’s life, the lessons we learn in our time here are supposed to change our lives; the point of civic education is that it changes the way in which we think. As we go out to vote, we should be able to use the critical thinking skills we learned in schools—beyond regurgitating information and memorizing bits of information.