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Miami Palmetto High School senior Gabriella Bechtinger is expecting to become much more involved in school activities this year, after transferring to Palmetto after the first quarter last year.
Bechtinger switched to Palmetto from the New World School of the Arts, where she was in the acting program. She been acting since she was six, starting at Miami Children’s Theater. She attended a magnet elementary and middle school for acting.
At New World she was also class president her sophomore and junior year.
“I used to be super committed,” she says. “I did a ton of shows.”
At some point she realized she was burned out and she was not interested in acting as a career. She says even if she hadn’t left New World, she would have eventually figured out she didn’t want to do that.
“I wanted to try a multitude of different things,” she says.
She’s happy she made the change,
“I have so much freedom to try different things. New World didn’t have a lot of class selection. At Palmetto I have a ton of different classes I can take. I feel challenged here.”
When she arrived at Palmetto she joined the No Place for Hate Club. This year she’s the secretary.
“We provide environments for people to meet each other,” she says. “We talk about inclusivity a lot. We get a lot of types of people. We make it so people can meet each other.”
The club also makes holiday cards for the patients at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital.
“The whole school does a toy drive, so we make the cards for them,” she says.
The club hosts events on several Fridays of the month. One included having students write positive sayings on sticky notes and placing them on the wall near the club sponsor’s classroom.
She’s also in the English Honor Society and the National Honor Society.
To achieve her goal of trying new things, she’s now a member of the yearbook staff as a photographer.
“I really do enjoy it,” she says. “I was happy I got that position. We go to events after school. And we shoot school life, events we have during lunch.”
If she goes to football games, she goes with other photographers to get action pictures or crowd shots and candid shots.
Outside of school, she participates in community service connected to her church, Miami Vineyard Community Church.
She works on outreach programs such as food drives or collections of school supplies that they take to foster care homes.
“They try to do an outreach thing at least once a month,” she says. “They will do different things. We will hand out water on the side of the street. We will give gift cards at Starbucks.”
She is in the youth group, and she serves as one of the interns for one of the media teams there and for guest services. The media teams run the Instagram accounts on the weekends.
“We’ll make content for the posts for engagement,” she says.
For guest services, she meets and greets church attendees in the atrium. She can also run the cash register for the coffee bar, or she can make the food and drinks.
In college, she wants to major in advertising or business and minor in film. She’s applying to Florida State University, the University of Miami, the University of Central Florida, Florida International or the University of North Florida.
She’s also a Posse nominee, so if she receives the scholarship she’ll attend with Pomona or Syracuse.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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