Student Leadership at Ditmas

Over my three years at Ditmas serving as a student leader under the
supervision of principal, Barry Kevorkian, I have grown as a leader both inside
and out. As the head of the, Ditmas Network Ambassadors, I have done public
speaking, publications and presentations at various schools. As leaders at
Ditmas ,we have explored many different opportunities such as the partnership
that we have with the Ivdu Upper Jewish School for Boys, only ten minutes away
from Ditmas but miraculously a completely different cultural world.

In the sixth grade we produced and published a book collaborated of works in literature on all topics. We also developed our leadership skills by serving on editorial committees based on our field of expertise, art and writing. In my opinion this has prepared us as future citizens of the world to be productive working on a team. We capped our publication off with a book party where we exercised our presentation skills through public speaking.

In the seventh grade we did not do a class book, instead we did a book publication with a handpicked group of students who wanted to progress their leadership skills and achieve more. Through the various struggles of our seventh grade year we gave up lunch time and recess to produce a book that we were all proud of. On top of that in the summer during our break we spent a full day at Scholastic with chief editor Andrea Pinkney. She showed us the publishing process and answered our eager questions on writing and leadership.

Currently in the eighth grade we are exhibiting various skills in leadership by running events inside and outside of our school. Recently we introduced our inaugural “L” Expo to the community and school at parent teacher night at Ditmas which was a big hit with a turn up of 426 parents. In the midst of that great success we lead an event all by ourselves interacting with parents and students explaining our program at Ditmas. We also switched gears by conducting a Financial Literacy Podcast with a group of four students, as head of the podcast.I felt that this expanded my leadership abilities beyond just literature on paper but also with multimedia.

In the eighth grade we have also had the distinguished opportunity to meet Daily News reporters such as Clem Richardson, Dennis Hamill and Filip Bondy who answered our questions  about becoming journalists as we prepare our school newspaper. As leaders we made up our  own questions and interacted with the reporters. In fact Mr. Bondy arrived a half hour early , which  resulted in our scrambling to quickly start our chat. We rolled with the punches to make sure the interview went well. That’s leadership in action. Dr. Reissman, founder of the
Writing Institute just supervised us as we conducted the interview.

Finally, leadership at Ditmas has molded us students to become creative thinkers and problem solvers, not only in the literary world but also in other industries. The Writing Institute developed and created by Dr. Reissman and the Ditmas News Network  developed by Mr. Carideo, Mr. Downes and Mr. Liotta have trained us as leaders. These skills and experiences make us ready to contribute to our community, our families and our country.