Every year, through the tireless dedication of the Social Studies Department’s Mrs. O’Sullivan, the leadership class works on individualized and group projects in an attempt to fully understand what it means to be a leader in the 21st Century. The process involves several steps and skills that the students learn to incorporate into their work, developing their ideas from proposals into a completed projects where students develop community, raise awareness for a cause, or inspire others to carry on a tradition or idea, all while passionately pursing the strong beliefs of these leadership students.
While the projects are the focal point of the course, this is merely the end product of a host of other skills developed throughout the semester. The students also work to identify areas in which they would like to improve upon common issues like public speaking, collaboration, time management, problem solving, and motivating others, all of which are worked on throughout the course.

As students leaders and potential leaders in their respective fields, these projects call upon students to put these learned and cultivated skills into action.

For 2018, there was a wide range of interests pursued in the class, but the outcome at the end of the semester was the same: impressive results. Students collaborated, modified, and impacted others in the local and surrounding communities by demonstrating their leadership abilities.

Some of the projects included:

• Angelo Casale, Colin Dineen, and Christiana Santucci decided to continue the Senior Walk tradition for the class of 2018. This event is held in order to give the seniors a chance to visit all of the schools in the district one last time before they graduate.
• Katherine Battaglia worked on raising donations for Friends of Karen, a group who supports critically-ill children and their families, by selling guesses for $2 each as to how many M&Ms were in a jar.
• Sarah Comer organized an Earth Day Bike Trail Clean-up, where she had about 50 participants clean up the Brewster/Carmel trailway.

After completing their projects, many students explained the life-changing and inspirational experience that it was, developing an awareness of the fact that they are capable of making a positive change in this world no matter who or where you are. That is an impact that last a lifetime.

In their own words, here are many of the projects and tasks taken on by Mrs. O’Sullivan’s Leadership students in our photo gallery.