The Mid-Level Regional Leadership Conference, or How I Stopped Doing Everything Else and Learned to Love Extending Myself to the Limit

Well, tomorrow's the day.

My school's ASB (Associated Student Body, Student Council to you) is going to host the something-or-otherth annual Middle Level Regional Leadership Conference for Southwest Washington. This is a conference that is sponsored by the Association of Washington School Principals, one of the many student leadership programs they sponsor.

Now, hosting the MLR's is a big honor for a school. There are generally three sites chosen a year - one in eastern Washington, one up towards Seattle, and one in southwest Washington. We last hosted in 1999, and it's taken about five years to get over the strain to be ready to host again.

As last year's MLR conference was wrapping up, I told Susan, the program coordinator, that I wanted my school (Jemtegaard) to host for the next year (this year, 2005). She assured me we had it.

Well, somewhere between last February and last September, that little promise got...forgotten, and our conference was given to Jason Lee Middle School, in Vancouver. No hard feelings to the folks at Jason Lee - I know a few people who teach there - but my kids (and I) were bummed that we'd ended up missing out on hosting this year.

Maybe I should explain a bit about what the MLR's are all about. Basically, the kids get put through a high-energy leadership seminar throughout a school day. There, they learn about group dynamics, public speaking, organizing events, putting on pep assemblies - in short, everything that makes a good ASB. The mid-levels are a sort of intensified version of the leadership camp AWSP puts on in the fall, at camp Cispus up near Mt. St. Helens. I've taken kids up there every year I've been an ASB advisor except for this one, because we were worried we'd end up on the cover of Newsweek as the tragedy of the week when we got caught in the latest volcanic eruption. (Turns out the weekend we were supposed to go, the campgrounds got a really good dusting of ash. Nothing dangerous, but it would've been scary, especially with as active as MSH was back in October).

Anyway, my kids missed leadership camp, and they missed hosting the MLR's, and then I found out that we were going to miss out on even going to the MLR's this year, as they were booked solid - we and several other schools had already been turned away.

Dejected, I told my crew, who, awesome kids that they are, took it in stride. Really. No sarcasm here - they were disappointed, but it didn't bother them too much.

(I've been telling my 8th grade officers and senators that I'm going to make sure they all fail the 8th grade and are held back next year so I can have them again. I've never, never, never had so good a group of kids to work with. The pictures that follow are a testament to this).

Anyway, the head honcho at AWSP wrote me an e-mail barely a month (!) ago, asking me if I'd be game for a crazy idea: would Jemtegaard like to host an "overflow location" for the MLR's? Joe felt badly that so many schools in the southwest part of the state ended up not being able to go. I talked it over with my crew, and they were all for it, so we started out.

Mind you, everybody else gets five months to prep for this conference.


We got four weeks.


When you're done reading here, scroll down and check out the work of my kids. I'm so proud of the work they did I could burst. See, the theme for the conference is "Food For Thought," and my kids were supposed to create signs for each school attending, to make them feel welcome. Well, the awesome students I have came up with the idea of taking common products and changing the names on them to reflect the names of the visiting schools. Using a really cool piece of technology we have that allows you to digitally project any image onto the wall using a projector and a document reader, my kids went online, downloaded photos of the logos of: Pepsi, Juicy Fruit gum, Oreos, Doritos, Pringles, Hersheys, Subway, Cheerios, Whatchamacallit, Heinz Ketchup, and Campbell's soup, projected the images on butcher paper, re-wrote the logos as the names of the schools attending, then painted them in. The results are quite cool, I think.

They also have to put on a skit, and the skit follows the same theme - they're doing a cooking show, only they're going to be "baking" a Jemtegaard Husky, using the core values that our students strive for: Honesty, Understanding, Scholarship, Kindness, Initiative, Enthusiasm, and Support (they spell out "HUSKIES" - get it?) So each kid adds "a cup of honesty," "three tablespoons of understanding," etc. It should be really cute.

Anyway, all that to say this past month has been absolutely crazy and pushed right out to the edge, but I'd do it all over again for these kids. Some of them read this blog, which is great, because I want them to know how proud I really am of them. Each and every one of them is an incredible human being.

So, enough of this...check out their artwork!!!