There is a new Reading Garden at Centennial Academy open for scholars and the community. In partnership with the Trust for Public Land and YMCA, APS celebrated the opening of this new schoolyard.
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.
We continue our Atlanta Families’ Awards for Excellence in Education winners with a look at Rendell Jackson, a physical-education teacher at King Middle School. Jackson is in his third year at King, after teaching in the Douglas and Fulton county school systems. A former pro football player in the Arena and Canadian football leagues, Jackson is also a published poet! He also earned an ING Run For Something Better Teacher Coordinator Award of Excellence.
For his Atlanta Families’ Awards project, Jackson plans to implement an aquatics program at King. His project aims to provide exposure to the benefits of swimming beyond recreation and plans work collaboratively with local high schools and the YMCA. The program will be based on the GuardStart: Lifeguarding Tomorrow guidelines, designed to prepare 11-to-14-year-olds to take Red Cross lifeguarding certification.
“There are a great deal of accidental drownings among children over the summer months, and two-thirds of them have been African Americans,” Jackson pointed out. “How crazy is that? I realized I had the tools at my disposal to save lives.” That includes a pool on the King campus.