I crashed into Britny Horton - literally - on the steps of City Hall the night of the first big protest against Mayor Bob Duffy's plan to consolidate the city and the school district. We were two of about 200 in what I've come to call the "mayoral control mosh pit" - positioning ourselves to make it into Council chambers before the room filled to capacity.

Horton, 17, immediately struck me as an extremely poised, well-spoken young lady. She was there with other members of the Mayor's Youth Advisory Council, a group that works to influence youth-oriented policy.

City youth, Horton says, have questions that nobody's taking seriously and answers that nobody wants to hear about the issues facing young people in Rochester, including the possibility of mayoral control. Initially in favor of the switch, Horton is less sure after studying results achieved under mayoral control in other cities.

"I learned that some of the percentages that some of these cities put out there, they also include GED graduation rates and things of that nature," she says. "So the numbers are kind of false."

Horton and other youth say that while they are the ones who will be most affected by a switch, they're also the ones that have, so far, gone without a voice in the proceedings.

Horton and other members of MYAC spoke recently about the possibility of mayoral control and the issues facing city youth.

The following is an edited version of interviews with Horton, Tamra Jones, and Jahmal Golden. Horton and Jones, 18, are seniors at Wilson Magnet. Golden, 16, is a junior at School of the Arts. [The opinions expressed in this story are the students' own and do not reflect an official position from MYAC. MYAC members are split on the topic of mayoral control and are drafting a letter with their concerns to Mayor Duffy.]

CITY: What are the adults in this conversation about mayoral control missing?

Horton: They're missing that it's not about them. They're missing that it's not about their right to vote, because if they have it or if they don't have it, it still doesn't change the fact that we're dying every day. And that there are other people in this country getting a better education than we are. In America, if you don't have an education, you're not going anywhere.

Jones: Adults need to speak more about the plan. What are the intentions? The big thing they're talking about is the $119 million that the school district gets. Are we still going to receive that? Will it be taken away? And what changes will they make in how they spend the money?

The one thing most do seem to agree on is that something is very wrong in the city schools.

Horton: The Rochester City School District is really broken. It's kind of like a broken leadership trying to lead broken people. It's not working, and you can see that.

I go to a city school and for me to have to be searched like I'm getting ready to get on an airplane or getting ready to walk into a prison facility...It makes me feel like I'm going to prison. Can I really learn under that?

We turn on the news and we see that the School Board...There's nothing wrong with debating. But you guys are having fights in which people are calling each other names. What kind of example are you showing us? You're supposed to be representing us. We're being misrepresented and it's not fair.

Jones: A big problem at Wilson is that we don't have a lot to do after school. We have sports, but not much more. We have the Hillside Work-Scholarship Connection, but that's only open to some students.

You have to build connections with community organizations; just open up and reach out to after-school programs. Problems like violence, a lot of these programs teach you how to deal with it.

What would you fix first in the city schools?

Horton: The curriculum. At a private or a suburban school, they teach them more. There's no reason why someone should receive a better education than I do. It's sad that a city school student's vocabulary is one-third of that of a suburban school student. It's a shame that for our sciences, we go up to physics when in a suburban school you can get anatomy. And the testing is horrible. We get tested on stuff that we haven't even been taught. That's setting us up to fail.

And I would also change some of the teachers, because it's a shame when there's a teacher who is so focused on the rules that they don't even look into what's really going on with that child. Maybe that child can't learn because there's something going on. One of my friends dropped out because she didn't have shoes to get there. They don't have coats, book bags. They don't have it.

If you have someone you know cares, you know is there, it kind of motivates you to want to be better, to do better. I'm self-motivated, but I know from my friends, it's like, "Why go? Nobody cares if I go, nobody cares if I don't."

Golden: I think there's a lot of work that we do need in the city school district. Just smaller things, like sharing books and we need new materials in certain schools. I think I would put more money into books and supplies, and more toward the arts. I'm a serious arts advocate: keeping arts in the schools and art-based programs throughout the city.

Is there anything in this debate that is particularly confusing or upsetting to you?

Golden: I did hear at a few debates, one at the Rochester Museum & Science Center and one at School of the Arts, that they were trying to get approval for this by, like, the beginning of February. And I thought that rushing it was really unacceptable because people don't even understand it. Pushing it on us is just not going to make anything better.

I've heard a lot of people say that the root of the problems like dropout rates and poverty is in the homes as opposed to the schools, so mayoral control may not be effective in that sense. It has a lot to do with motivation in the family and the community.

Horton: I went to several forums in which everybody seems not to be focusing on the issue of mayoral control or accountability; they take personal jabs at the mayor. How I see it personally is that we're all too old for that and this situation is way too big for that. He's trying to make a change. So if you don't feel that change is right, why don't you propose an idea? But to take personal jabs at somebody who's trying to help your children...It's immature, and it's like you're really hindering the process.