There are times as a community member that I get to spend hours with the youth in Ortonville, and let me tell you, we have some incredible kids here.
Last week was one of my busiest, as I was invited to participate in career day at both Oakwood Elementary School on April 22 and Harvey-Swanson Elementary School on April 24. Following that, Brandon Groveland Youth Assistance hosted our annual Youth Recognition Awards in the evening on April 24. And while it was busy, it was the absolute best.
When you speak at career day, you’re teaching children all about a career they may not have known existed. Most of the students were very familiar with the newspaper that gets delivered to their mailboxes every week, and some of them told me about the times they had been in the paper before.
But, one of my favorite parts of my job is that it’s different every day, so it can be hard to present to the students when your job varies. Plus, my props and photos were less fun than other presenters. A local mental health professional brought a therapy dog, someone brought a horse, there were fire trucks and swat vans to explore, and, of course, Miss Fran Hotchkiss was there from the Brandon Township Public Library, and just her presence is exciting to the students because they love her.
No joke, one of the classes I had made it a game to go through the paper to see how many times they could find Miss Fran’s picture (it was the edition with the story I did on her 50 paid years at BTPL). They were even pointing to random people saying it was Miss Fran, they were so excited.
But, one of the other things I love about my job is that I can do it anywhere. All I need is my phone or a pen and paper. So, to demonstrate this, I volunteered their teacher to be a subject, and each class helped me write a short story about their teachers. I started off asking how they got into teaching, and the students asked all the follow up questions.
After that, I taught them what we in journalism call the Inverted Pyramid style of writing, in which the most important information is at the very top of the story: the who, what, where, why, when and how. So I’d ask the class what the most important information they heard was, and keep that going until we had a little story about their teacher’s career written on the nifty digital white boards they have.
Thank you teachers for being such good sports.
I also got many questions such as what my favorite part of my job is, how do we print papers, and how many papers have I written. Actually, a student answered that for me, because I’ve been here for 7 years, and I’m not great at doing math in my head on the spot, so he did the multiplication for me.
The kids were wonderful. One little girl hugged me and said she wanted to be me when she grows up, which just warms my heart.
And after Harvey-Swanson, I went back to the office to help finish the paper, had a chiropractor appointment (luckily, as standing all day was not good for me), ran home to eat and ran back out for youth recognition awards.
We honored almost 50 wonderful, incredible students this year, and every year I am just amazed at the generosity and volunteerism of those students. This year our theme was Youth Volunteers Rise Above, and boy did they. Those students rose above expectations and rose above and beyond adversity.
Within all those students, we honored four with Gold Star awards for their exceptional work in the past year.
Jessica Swift, a member of the Brandon Care Bears, was nominated for her volunteerism with the Ortonville VFW Post 582. She helped place flags for Memorial Day, wreaths for Christmas, cleaned veteran graves, and even checked in on a home-bound veteran in the community who had a broken leg to make sure he was doing alright and reported on how he was doing to VFW Post 582 commander Dennis Hoffman.
Eden Taylor, a senior at Brandon High School, went out of her way to organize an after-school tutoring program called the Brandon Math and Academics Club for her peers, on top of maintaining her own grades and classes.
Landon Cramer, an eighth grader at the middle school, has risen to the rank of Sergeant in the Young Marines, and serves on various leadership teams, guiding and mentoring squads. He is also committed to Drug Demand Reduction, and he educates his peers on the dangers of drugs and alcohol.
Arthur Davis, a kindergarten student at Harvey-Swanson, has type-1 diabetes. While he is active in managing it and goes to the office every day to get his levels checked, he is also not shy about educating his peers and adults on type-1 diabetes. He and his family also raise money for type-1 diabetes research. And his teacher said even with all that, he greets her every day with a smile, works hard in class, and is always eager to help his peers.
I wish we could give every student a Gold Star award, because I’ll tell you what, narrowing it down to these four was hard for the committee. I love seeing the students feel proud of their accomplishments and get recognized for the good things they do out of the kindness of their hearts.
I think my favorite part, though, was after the ceremony when families were heading out, and one of the students who had been honored for his volunteerism at the BTPL (by Miss Fran, of course), recognized me from career day and gave me a big hug.
I love getting to see this kids grow into the incredible people that they are: that is one of my favorite parts of my job.