EXPO: expediting students skills

By Lilly Wetzel

Silver Creek Leadership Academy (SCLA) held its annual EXPO on October 2, 2023 to preview the seniors’ culminating capstone project.

SCLA gives students experience working in a professional environment, where they have to communicate with adults and create their own goals in a very interactive way.

“I wanted kids to have a leg up going into college and going into work,” said Carrie Adams, the program director.

“We give our students in high school a lot of opportunities that a lot of people don’t have until college, like running events and interacting with community leaders,” stated Adams.

More of these experiences are skills as scary and necessary as public speaking. The program gives students practice and experience that make public speaking easier.

“Freshman year I learned how to present in front of a crowd,” said Max Nacius, Leadership Academy president. “When you first start doing it [public speaking] it’s not that fun… but once you get to do those things enough you can start making bullet points in your head on what you need to go over… which makes it sound like you’re not just reading off of a script but you’re reading your internal thoughts.”

SCLA students have the opportunity to learn how to fail and how to bounce back from failure, which is an inevitable part of life. It gives the students the skills and opportunity to work and confront their mistakes.

“A lot of this class is celebrating failures and how we react to failures,” said Juliette Forbes, the SCLA grade 10 teacher. “Other classes where it’s like, here’s your test, this is your score and it is what it is, you succeeded or you failed and then we move on to the next thing. In this class we really do so much trial and error and so much reflection.”

The SCLA 10 class that planned the EXPO, struggled significantly on the day of the event due to weather and the In-and-Out Burger food truck showing up over an hour late. They figured out how to handle the situation on the spot.

Another goal of the Leadership Academy is to make the students feel like their achievements are because of their work, to give them a sense that they have the capability to create something themselves.

“[I want to] help them feel a sense of autonomy,” stated Forbes. “I want them [SCLA 10] to feel like we did EXPO instead of ‘my teacher told me to do A, B, and C, then we did it and we got the A.”

EXPO showcases all of these skills for friends, family, teachers, students, and mentors so others can see the work SCLA students put into creating real things that impact the community.