The Junior Peer Leadership Project: Middle Schoolers Escape The Room
If you, like many of us, remember your ninth grade retreat to Fishkill in agonizing detail, you may remember the upperclassmen who came with you on the trip. They are part of the High School’s Peer Leadership Program, and their goal is to take on a more visible and impactful leadership role in the school to improve the lives of younger students at Grace.
The main purpose of Peer Leaders is to act as a support system for some of our community’s younger members. Aside from going on the Fishkill trip, Senior Peer Leaders join these 9th graders in their advisories every Friday to catch up with the students and offer any helpful advice they can give.
But before you become a Senior Peer Leader, you spend your junior year in the program as well. When you are a Junior Peer Leader, you have an hour-long class every Wednesday, where you are taught ways to improve your leadership skills and involvement at the Middle School. These skills are then put to use every Friday morning when 11th graders go to the 86 campus to attend CGC with students in grades 5-8. CGC is a time when a handful of middle schoolers, meet with a CGC faculty leader, from the Middle School, and talk about what’s going on around the school and in their lives.
Throughout the current school year, the Junior Peer Leaders have been working towards a specific goal. This goal is visibility. They have tirelessly organized various projects striving for some well-deserved recognition from the greater Grace community.
In their weekly class, the 11th graders are workshopping different ways to improve the middle schoolers’ CGC experience on a weekly basis. Most recently, they have been working on an exciting final event.
The 11th grade Peer Leaders announced a special CGC “competition” on January 17th, which will include many different events that will occur over the next few months.
The first challenge was for the CGC groups to solve three riddles; each group was awarded points based on how successful they were.
The next event the Junior Peer Leaders organized was an “Escape the Room,” which took place this past Friday, March 6th, from 4:00-5:30 pm at the High School campus.
All the Middle School students were invited to come over to the 46 Campus and divide into their CGC groups led by the juniors. Students from the Middle School convened for a short pizza party in the lower commons and then went with their groups to try and “escape the room” in a puzzle-solving, scavenger-hunt-type activity.
Before the event, a few Junior Peer Leaders shared their personal opinions about it with the Gazette. Adelle Dauhajre says, “I think the escape the room being a group activity brings everyone closer together: it’s a fun way to interact with other Grace students!”
The project seemed to generate lots of excitement from all around the program. “This event seems to be a perfect opportunity to strengthen connections across campuses!” commented CGC Faculty Advisor Mr. Andre. “Giving the Juniors a chance to be leaders outside of our classrooms and providing middle schoolers with a chance to see the High School and high schoolers in a more dynamic context is a great idea.”
While setting up, Peer Leader Haley Wilkins commented, “We think it is important to spend more time with the middle schoolers in different settings in order to build a good relationship. When we were brainstorming ideas for an outside of school event, we came up with the idea of creating an escape the room as a chance for them to spend time in the high school building as they participate in this fun and challenging team building activity!”
In fact, after the event, many Peer Leaders were surprised by how smoothly everything went. One of the leading planners of the project, Brody Pontarelli ’21, said that he believed “it went better than any of us expected! I think that the Peer Leaders who ran the rooms really took the initiative to get everyone involved.” As they cleaned up, the room leaders exchanged some funny stories about their experiences. Even non-room leaders seemed to have great things to say. Shomari Smith noted that “It was actually really entertaining for everyone, even the people who didn’t run a room.” As the middle schoolers exited the high school building, it seemed pretty clear that the results were positive from all sides.
Hopefully, these projects, and events, in particular, will have helped the Peer Leadership Program gain visibility throughout the school in the long term, encouraging future applicants and supporting the younger members of the Grace community.