Emma Seckinger will be the Palmetto High School senior class president when school goes back into session in August. Previously she was the secretary for the freshman, sophomore and junior classes, but she decided to run for president when the junior class president opted to run for student council president.
“Our main focus on next year is to bring up the spirit level,” Seckinger says. “We’ve had meetings to see how we can get more students involved in pep rallies and senior events.”
The class officers have discussed adding another fundraiser to help pay for all the senior events, including prom, grad bash and senior picnic.
“We wouldn’t take anything away, we just want to add things,” she says.
As a member of the lacrosse team and has been on the team since her freshman year. She will be team captain this year. Seckinger says she knows how important sports are to building school spirit.
“We’ve been getting better every year that I’ve been on the team,” she says. “We have made it to districts the last two years.”
This summer, Seckinger planned to attend a lacrosse camp at Northwestern University. She planned to go with the lacrosse team co-captain. Last fall she played club lacrosse and plans to do that again this year. The additional playing time helped — she was an honorable mention to the All Miami-Dade Lacrosse team as a sophomore and a junior was named to the All Miami-Dade second team.
Seckinger is the manager editor of the Palmetto school newspaper, The Panther. She says there will be more changes at the paper in this school year, following some big changes last year.
“We are changing the sections again and we are creating many new roles on staff,” she says. “We want to try and cover more next year, especially since we are putting greater emphasis on online news. We’ll have more stories and we want to make it more like how a real newspaper runs, instead of coming out with a newspaper once a month.”
Seckinger says she loves working on the paper.
“I like the sense of family that it creates, everyone is really close,” she says. “We help each other out. If you’re bored, you can go into that class. You can have lunch with those people. It creates a certain bond that can only be found in that classroom.”
She also enjoys the writing.
“That’s why I joined the paper in the first place,” she says.
Outside of school, Seckinger is in a community service club Students Offering Support (SOS). She will be the first vice president in charge of finding service events for club members. The club has two main fundraisers – a garage sale and Bowling Against Bullying.
Last spring, Seckinger was captain of her Relay for Life Team at Evelyn Greer Park.
“The theme was books and we were the Rainbow Fish,” she says. “We wanted to do a book that everyone has heard of. Also, we were thinking of what we could sell before we chose a book and we wanted to sell Sno Cones. They are colorful, so that’s why we chose that.”
Seckinger says the team raised about $400 from their efforts at the Relay for Life event.
As senior, Seckinger will join millions of other high school students in sending out college applications. She says that she has not decided on a major course of study, so she is not sure about the that schools will be at the top her list. But she says she would like to go to a school up north where she could experience the change of seasons.
By Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
