A few years ago, Lenape High School administrators were looking for a way to recruit student leaders.
However, they didn’t just want the students running organizations or on student council. They wanted to work with all students who displayed some sort of leadership qualities.
To do this, the administration created the Lenape Leadership Program. Principal Tony Cattani described it as a way to develop more and better leaders in the school community.
“We have a lot of leaders in our building,” Cattani said. “Do we wait for those kids to come to use or do we gravitate to those kids?”
Assistant athletic and activities director Brian Laddey has run the program since its beginning. The program begins in the summer with a leadership academy. The leadership academy includes a new group of students who will become student leaders for the remainder of their career at the school.
“Staff members identify students who have leadership potential,” Laddey said. “Every student has the opportunity to be a leader.”
The students participate in a variety of leadership skill-building activities in the academy. The skills they learn come into play when school returns to session in the fall. The leaders each go into a freshman physical education class and get to know the students in what is called a peer group connection. Students also take a leadership course and participate in student activities.
What has resulted in the program is a deeper base of student leaders at the school.
“They’ve taken leadership roles in more things than they can count,” Cattani said.
The leadership program is just one of many in the Lenape Regional High School District falling under the district’s Upstander and No Place For Hate initiatives.
Cherokee High School is looking to create a leadership filled student body in its own way. After seeing problems with discipline following the 2010–11 school year, the school developed a character education program called AIR. The three values represented in AIR are accountability, integrity and respect.
The school focuses on those values after a survey showed those three to be most important for the student body to learn.
“It was clear we had a core value system at Cherokee and needed to highlight it,” administrator Justin Smith said.
AIR quickly became a familiar philosophy to Cherokee students. An AIR logo design contest was held and students created banners with the words accountability, integrity and respect on them. Those banners greet students, staff and visitors at the school’s main entrance.
The school has put its value system into practice, incorporating it into the district’s initiatives and emphasizing it in the classroom.
“For the teachers, it was a choice in how they wanted to put core values in what they did,” Smith said.
Cherokee is also building a base of student leaders. Students identified with leadership skills will be meeting with inspirational speaker and life coach Kevin Touhey this year. A Medford resident, Touhey will help the students understand and better use their leadership skills in school.
Programs such as the ones at Lenape and Cherokee are happening all over the district, according to Superintendent Carol Birnbohm. She said while each high school has its own unique character, all of them have the same mission of developing the leaders and upstanding citizens of tomorrow.
