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Miami Palmetto High School senior Emma Schain has been accepted to Florida State University, the University of Georgia. the University of Alabama, Texas Christian University and several other schools. She’s waiting for one more acceptance before she decides which university she’ll attend next year to study Business Finance.
This school year Schain has completed her final season as a swimmer at Palmetto. She was the team captain. The team finished first at the District Championships and most of the swimmers qualified for the Regional Championships. A couple even went on to swim at the State Championships.
Schain herself did well at regionals, dropping time in her events. She swam the 100 breast and the 100 free.
“Swimming is the second sport I’ve done,” she says. “I did gymnastics for nine years. I started swimming in eighth grade.”
She began gymnastics at six and competed for five or six years. She switched to swimming in eighth grade because her sister was already in swimming. Schain discovered she was good at swimming, so she kept going.
“I like to compete,” she says.
She really liked competing on the balance beam.
“I was good at it in competition,” she says.
Now she works as a gymnastics coach at Florida Gymnastics Training Center coaching six- and seven-year-olds in gymnastics basics.
“It’s fun to help pass on what I’ve learned,” she says.
She says the goal is not always getting to the next level.
“For one kid it could be learning how to do a handstand, and another it could be learning to point their toes,” she says.
Outside of school, she volunteers as a student leader at Christ Fellowship in Palmetto Bay every Friday.
“I lead the seventh grade girls small group,” she says. “After they hear a message from our student pastor, we go and discuss it,” she says. “It’s part of a youth group, Christ Fellowship Students.”
The student leaders are sent the verses that the sermon is based on, and guided questions.
She usually takes notes during the sermon and then they go over it in the group.
Schain plans to continue to be involved even when she goes away to college. She’ll continue to volunteer during college breaks.
At Palmetto, she is the head of advertising for Student Council. She makes the posts, banners and flyers for any Student Council sponsored event.
She’s a member of the National Honor Society.
“We help support student community service projects in school,” she says. “We just had a baby food drive. We had a feminine product hygiene product drive. And we do the canned food drive and toy drive around Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
Until this year, Schain was in drama. She was the treasurer for the Thespian Honor Society, and she participated in District competitions, where she earned superiors in set design and publicity.
She’s a Health Information Project (HIP) peer educator. For eight modules, she and her fellow peer educators go to ninth grade classrooms to talk to the ninth graders about health issues. They go in teams of four.
HIP was started years ago at Palmetto and is now at schools across Florida. The modules cover topics such as drugs, alcohol, and nutrition. Schain says the curriculum is presented clinically, and factually.
“Today we did gun safety, how to maintain our physical and mental health, and technology and social media affect our lives as teens,” she says.
The freshmen are encouraged to ask questions and discuss the issues that were presented in the class.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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