Redefining Leadership: PEAK’s Bold Progress at St. Mary’s
Over the past 20 years, much of PEAK and Lake Valley Camp's success can be attributed to our partner schools. At first, this meant building relationships with school staff and recruiting students to our summer camp. As we’ve grown, we’ve expanded our programming opportunities at our partner schools, but one school partnership in particular has quickly grown.
St. Mary’s, formerly known as Messmer, is a K - 8 in the Riverwest area that has worked with PEAK since 2021. We began facilitating our Leadership Labs programs on site over lunch and recess. The program was meant to bring PEAK’s values and leadership curriculum inside the school, but asking students to give up their free time proved difficult. In the ‘22-’23 school year, PEAK shifted to after school programming. The change helped a lot according to Laura Martinez, PEAK’s Youth Programs Coordinator, who has been working at St. Mary’s since the beginning of our partnership. After school programming increased attendance and made the time feel more intentional, although it still wasn’t perfect. "There was a lot of trial and error.. trying to figure out how to get these kids motivated to come to PEAK, and it's not just free time for them. It's free time and intentional leadership work with them,” Laura explained. The Youth Programs team discussed how they could grow, and they came up with two significant changes for the ‘23-’24 school year.
The first was a significant expansion to Leadership Labs to include St. Mary’s 4th graders. "We proposed the change and they thought it was a great idea to bring in returning 4th graders to support the learning of the new 3rd graders... so the first year is more of the theory, and the second year is more the application of those skills,” said Maddy Wilson, Director of Youth Programs. This allowed last year's 3rd graders to return and help teach the incoming Leadership Labs participants, giving them more opportunities to learn and apply PEAK’s leadership model. The second change was an increased emphasis on options for the students. Laura made a point to prioritize autonomy, saying, "I think it's important to give them choices, to give them a sense of being independent and being able to explore their own interests." This culminated in a new incentive program, allowing students to play a role in deciding their points system, how they would be tracked, and at the end of the session, what their reward would be. Last Spring, the group of students collaborated to make a class tracker and used it to earn an ice cream party hosted by PEAK!
Our partnership with St. Mary’s continues to grow. This school year, not only does the team feel much more confident, with a lot of the programming now documented and standardized, but so do the students. "[The new 4th graders] were even more prepared to lead this year than the last group of 4th graders were. They now saw someone else already go through that experience, and they were really ready to step into the 'now I'm the leader,' role because they saw it modeled for them,” said Maddy.
The Youth Programs team didn’t stop there though. St. Mary had a need for a new student council alternative, an opportunity that PEAK was eager to take advantage of with our Culture Keepers. This is a new initiative that gives St. Mary’s middle schoolers a chance to assess school culture and work with staff to institute student-led solutions. Both Maddy and Laura are excited about piloting this program and how it might impact the school and students. "I am super stoked for the idea that next year the kids who started as 3rd graders will be middle schoolers and can now be a part of Culture Keepers,” Maddy explained. It will be exciting to see how the programs, the students, and the school all grow together in the coming years!