Leadership Course Changes Student Lives
By Chris Seymour | Correspondent at July 30, 2024 | 6:00 pm | Print
School may be out for the summer, but 50 New Britain adolescents are getting a crash course in leadership training, thanks to a Parks & Recreation program called “Leaders in Training.”
The program—which has been around for over a decade, according to Parks & Recreation Assistant Program Coordinator Megan Dowling—is a seven-week leadership development camp at A.W. Stanley Park that is open to kids who finished grades 6, 7 or 8 in the preceding school year.
“We aim to give them the skills they can use to be a leader in life and hopefully one day they will come and work for us [as a lifeguard or a camp counselor, for example],” said Dowling, who oversees the Leaders in Training (LIT) program. “We work on teamwork, communication, safety, responsibility, being respectful, and trustworthy and honest, and all those things that really help create a great leader.”
The program has been very popular—and very successful. “We have so many former LST’s who are now working for us so it’s just so wonderful,” added Dowling. “The program is definitely working—we have lots of kids who have gone through the system, and our camp counselors right now and lifeguards [completed the LST program] so it is really exciting to see.”
Getting into the program is an accomplishment in and of itself since there are so few spots—50 at most—available each year, noted Dowling, and kids must go through an application process that requires two letters of recommendation and an interview with Dowling.
“It’s a very in demand program,” she said. “Unfortunately, there aren’t many camps for middle school youth here in the city so we get a huge turnout of interested participants and it’s the hardest thing to turn someone away, but unfortunately we only have a certain amount of money for this program. But I wish I could have 200, and if we had 200 spots, I know I could fill them.”
When she is interviewing kids for the program, Dowling tells them they will be doing a lot of learning—just not the classroom variety they are used to.
“We are not sitting at a desk,” she explained. “We are at a park doing interactive games with one another; we are working as a team to build a stronger team, so there is a lot of hands on learning that takes place. And I recognize that it is the summertime so the last thing I want to do is bore them so we have a lot of fun, hands-on opportunities for them.”
The group of 50 kids—who are overseen by five group leaders—are broken into smaller units to build their leadership skills. “What we do is they really work very closely together to build those leadership skills within the team itself, so they are broken into the smaller teams of 10, and we have five group leaders who oversee the 50 kids and they work with them individually but we do a lot of work as an entire team of 50 as well,” continued Dowling.
When asked if the kids see the opportunity as a life-changing experience, Dowling said that realization seems to usually come afterward.
“I don’t know if they see it right away but they see it afterwards; and we hear from parents a lot of times—’You’ll never believe how great the start of the school year was for them’ and all those great things,” said Dowling.
LIT also gives the kids a chance to prepare for future job interviews—and to explore possible career fields by having the opportunity to talk to various professionals.
“We have a Career Day and about 10 people come in and talk about their career path and so the kids will rotate every five to 10 minutes and ask questions [such as] how did they go down their career path?” Dowling explained. “And it helps prepare the kids for interviewing and jobs.”
