Sugar House, Utah - This year Highland Park Elementary is bringing together a team of outstanding students to serve in leadership positions in their grades. The name of this small group of leaders is the Highland Park Roadrunner Leadership team, which consists of students from second to sixth grade who have demonstrated leadership skills.

“We are all leaders at Highland Park,” Amber Pulley, one the teachers who runs the team, said. “This is our school motto this year, and we have designated a team of student leaders compromised of representatives from second graders to sixth graders.” 

The students were nominated by their former teachers for their leadership abilities. The Leadership Team so far this year has helped with different school activities and put together a monthly newscast explaining what each grade has been learning. 

“I like it because you make new friends, and you get to know more teachers and students,” Savannah Moon, the fourth-grade representative, said. 

The Leadership Team meets twice a month after school, and during those meetings they help with different school activities. One of their recent ones was the jog-a-thon, where they helped sort out the tickets for each student in the school. 

“This helped out the PTA greatly,” Pulley said. “With the collaboration of the student leaders and the PTA the jog-a-thon was a huge success.” 

The students have fun volunteering and helping with their monthly videos, that they not only participate in, but they help edit. Even though the first graders and kindergarten students don’t have a representative, the older students on the Leadership Team are there to help. 

During their last meeting, the students of Pulley asked what they could do to help their fellow students be safe on the playground and in their classrooms. A lot of them had good ideas about not sitting far back in their seats so they don’t fall backwards and hit their head. 

Grace Clark, the fifth-grade representative, said, “It’s kind of fun to be the first one and kind of help set stones on what can be done.” Grace said she has helped diffuse situations where someone didn’t say something nice to someone else, and she was there to help them work it out. She was very excited she was chosen to be in the group. 

During recess, the team has been learning from fifth-grade teacher Mike Sorensen on how to help with playground cooperation. The teachers and staff want to help students feel included. The students enjoy getting treats during their meetings and really have a drive to help the school. 

“I love being on the leadership team because we get to serve people in the school and do lots of fun stuff,” said third-grade representative Brayden King. “I want to help the school by making our school more popular, and making it feel like a better place to be.”