APS Cool Kid: Lucy Leonard

Lucy Leonard, a recent graduate of Grady High School, will spend her summer as a YMCA camp counselor, teaching zip lining and leadership skills to teens.

Since the age of 7, Lucy Leonard has spent part of each summer vacation in the same way.

Located only four hours outside of Atlanta, yet still worlds away, the Henry Grady High School recent graduate is a veteran at YMCA’s Camp Thunderbird, located in North Carolina.  Learning lifelong lessons and developing valuable friendships year after year as a camper, this year Lucy has chosen a summer of service, spending the next few weeks as a camp counselor.  Lucy hopes to further develop her leadership and management skills while teaching other youth skills that they can carry back to the classroom in the fall.

So how does she describe being responsible for a cabin of twelve 14 year old girls? “I find them both fun and challenging,” says Lucy.

This year, her counselor responsibilities have taken her to the challenge course, where she teaches young campers how to climb, rappel, and zipline.

Come August, Lucy will head to Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.  Having earned a merit-based scholarship to Tulane, she is currently pondering studying anthropology, international relations or journalism.  Lucy is very interested in travel, writing, and photography and developed her sharp newsroom skills while serving as the associate managing editor of The Southerner, Grady High School’s award winning newspaper.

Always seeking a new challenge, Lucy hopes to further her journalistic experience at the Tulane Hullabaloo, the university’s student newspaper.  Lucy has applied for the Hullabaloo’s Summer Journalism Experience, which would give her an advance taste of news writing in the Big Easy.