Personal Leadership Class Takes Action for the School

By Marko Espenilla, Reporter       Published: November 12, 2019

One of Northwest’s newest electives is Personal Leadership Skills that is taught by Mr.Smith in his 7th period, the new elective is about giving students an opportunity to improve themselves through leadership and character development. Mr.Smith recently gave three projects based on what the students want to improve on the campus. The three major projects that the class has for the campus is, “Music during Lunch”, “School Supplies”, and “The Garden”. 

These long-term projects are meant to improve the overall environment of Northwest in order to provide students a better learning experience. As Patrick Cudal(Grade 12), believes that this project offers, “Team building and real-world experience.” Last month, the administration including Ms.Statuski, reviewed the classes proposed projects and gave authorization for the projects in hopes it would help students followed by additional ideas for their projects for the school.

Despite these big projects that the class came up with, Mr. Smith still tries to fit in his own lesson plans stating, “Well I think the biggest plans that I have for this class is to involve themselves in this class and school, and I want you all to feel more comfortable in engaging in different situations”. This shows that this project is critical in his lesson plans, as it provides a big lesson for his students and probably an opportunity to demonstrate the purpose of his new class to the school.

Although one of the students, Patrick Cudal(Grade 12)  says “I think it’s too hard to get the projects actually going because it takes too much time and it takes too much authorization which takes a long time”. Although these projects are slowly being completed in order to provide the school with a better learning environment for the students, the expected results are beginning to really show.

Recently, on November 6th before second lunch, the Leadership Class managed to remove a majority of the plants in the quad for preparations of “The Garden” project. These projects are based on statistics gathered by surveys given to the school and personal experience that the students of the class personally had. 

These projects could do some real good to the school with high expectations from what they could accomplish, Mr. Smith says, “I don’t know, the reason why I say I don’t know is because there are no blueprints for these projects, this was merely an experiment to see where this was going. I’m allowing things to develop”.