By MATT PIKE

Students from the St. Joseph schools, known as the Student Voice Alliance, met with city officials this month to discuss their ideas to help improve the city.

The group of students were narrowed down from a larger group that met at Empower U in downtown St. Joseph last month, developing ideas to help with homelessness and overall cleanliness of the city.

St. Joseph City Manager Mike Schumacher says the group came to city officials also with ideas of how to better communicate with people their age, an idea that includes going to Tik Tok

“Because that’s what that age bracket, that’s the current social media platform of choice, and there’s a lot to that and those students are going to help us come up with a communication strategy,” Schumacher says on the KFEQmunnity show. “Because how you communicate to somebody my age versus how you communicate to somebody whose let’s say 16. Is completely different, and one is not better that the other it’s just different, so they’re going to teach us how to communicate to that age bracket.”

Schumacher says the topics that students want to discuss, perhaps unironically, mirror the city survey results

“It’s driving our entire organization at this point, so I’m fairly comfortable that 16 year olds didn’t really fill out those surveys, and if they did it would have been very few of them, but their concerns mirror, for the most part, mirror the citizen satisfaction survey,” Schumacher explains. “So, it’s kind of a confirmation of the survey that we’re on the right track and it also highlighted a lot of opportunities.”

Schumacher says after discussion with the group, they will even continue to meet with city officials throughout the summer to work on these ideas.

“We would have bet $1 that they would not be interested over the summer, but the group without hesitation said we want to do it through the summer, we want to keep this conversation going so we will be here,” Schumacher says. “That made me incredibly proud of that group and if you take a step back and you look at that, that shows the dedication.”

Schumacher says the dedication adds to his excitement for the program, as well as the missions of the students aligning with the current existing mission for the city.

You can follow Matt on X @KfeqMatt and St. Joseph Post @StJosephPost.