Summer Program Trained Leaders at Heights High

Dairion Grayer said he overcame his shyness. Aaliyah Saafir learned that patience is a virtue no matter the situation.

It seems there’s a small group of students who entered the school year feeling a lot more confident in their abilities. The students, 36 of them from all four grade levels, participated in the Leaders in Training program over the summer, an experience they said taught them a little more about themselves.

“I’m not really into school programs and at first I was real shy and there were a lot of new faces”, said Dairion, a 17-year-old junior. “After a while I just got to know everybody and start to learn their personalities, and it helped me be a better leader. I can talk to them more instead of sitting in a corner and be shy all the time.”

The LIT program, which was developed in a partnership between the CH-UH school district and , ran for six months from April until the beginning of the school year, and included leadership workshops, designing and hosting a fundraiser for a local charity and a two-week internship at the .

Students went through a detailed application process to be accepted and were initially chosen based on the recommendation of teachers and other school officials. Cindy Schmidt, school social worker for the district and coordinator of the program, said she wasn’t looking for those with the best grades, but for those who showed real leadership potential.

“I wanted to give kids an opportunity that may not have an opportunity like this,” she said. “In their application they talked about their role models, they talked about qualities they thought would make them a good leader, they talked about something about them they feel people don’t see in them yet. That told us a lot about them.”

The students got some real work experience during the library internship, where they performed regular duties like stocking materials and working with customers, and participated in a one-week leadership camp in University Circle.

But what they felt helped the most was the service project, in which more than $300 was raised for both the Providence House in Cleveland and Kick-It, an organization that raises money for child cancer research.

Girls and boys were separated for the service project, and each team had to work together to choose its own charity and figure out how to raise money.

The boys had it easy: a connection with the Cleveland Indians organization led them to the Kick-It organization, and the group of 12 guys raised money by raffling off sporting equipment and selling food at a performance of one of the member’s bands.

The girls, on the other hand, had to contend with 24 different ideas from each member ­— everything from saving whales to helping people in Africa — but within an hour they narrowed it down to the Providence House, a non-profit that works to stop child abuse and help at-risk kids.

Aaliyah, 16, said working with a large group of people with such wide-ranging ideas was a great lesson in using patience to understand everyone’s points of view.

“You have to be patient,” she said. “It’s a really important skill to have because if you’re working with a group of people and you don’t necessarily agree with their ideas you still have to be patient and hear them out because you might change your stance.”

The group raised money by making and selling cards, bookmarks and yarn dolls, and raffling off a book bag purchased through some of the $50,000 in state grant money that helped fund the LIT program. The grant was overseen by Starting Point, a Northeast Ohio child care and early-education resource and referral agency.

Both groups were given only two weeks to develop and implement the fundraiser, which made working together all the more important. Ari Davis, a 17-year-old senior, said at first she didn’t think the group was going to succeed, especially when the yarn dolls weren’t selling, but said constant communication with group members and working closely with them to get the sales on track helped her overcome those doubts.

“That’s all part of being a leader is taking that risk, coming up with an idea and following it through,” Schmidt said. “It’s feeling some confidence yourself that, ‘we’re going to make this happen’ and ‘we’re going to do this’ and making it happen.”

Schmidt said she’s already received several calls from parents of students who participated attributing their child’s improved grades so far this year to the program. She hopes to continue it next summer.