New Westminster graduate Hailey Mira will be moving on to Florida State University later this summer. Mira and her twin sister Kelsey graduated from Westminster after attending the school from kindergarten through twelfth grade.
Mira was Westminster’s Silver Knight nominee for athletics. She won the Most Outstanding Leadership Student Award and Outstanding Orchestra Student Award.
Mira was a three-sport star, playing soccer, running track and field and cross-country.
On the cross country team, she was varsity captain for one year. She was the Most Valuable Player in ninth and tenth grades. She was Second Team All-Dade and Third Team All-Dade while the team went on to win five district titles and four regional titles. She also qualified for the state championships both as a team member and as an individual every year.
Mira played soccer for three years, and she ran track, in ninth and tenth grades, participating in the 4×400, 4×800 relays, the 800, mile and two mile events.
In her junior year she suffered an injury from running which required surgery that cut into her soccer season and kept her from running track that year and cross-country this year. She played soccer again until injury flared up again.
Even with the long hours athletes put in for practice and games, Mira still earned more than a thousand community service hours – and more than half of those hours were earned baking cakes for Bake-a-Wish.
“It’s a foundation started a few years back,” she says. “Where we bake cakes for underprivileged kids.”
The girls in group divided up the responsibility of baking birthday cakes for 750 children. Every week, they would deliver the cakes to children who otherwise might not have had a birthday cake and a candle.
To be fair to the children, all the cakes were the same. They were all Bundt cakes decorated with chocolate frosting and white sprinkles. Each cake had the same box and each had a candle taped to the top.
Mira says she would buy the cake mixes but the frostings, the boxes, the sprinkles and the stickers were given to them.
“Some month I bake 20 cakes, some moths, 12, or eight. It varies,” she says.
The cakes were usually taken to the home of the organization president, who would distribute them to the children. Mira would occasionally go along for the delivery.
“They are all so excited, with smiles on their face, it’s wonderful,” she says. “We go different times throughout the year. For Christmas we’ll go and make Christmas cookies with them.”
At school, Mira was class secretary her freshman and sophomore year and then her junior and senior year she was class president.
“I would help organize all the service projects. We’d go to learning Links every year,” she says. “It’s a school for kids with disabilities.”
They’d split into groups and go into classrooms to do activities with the students. At the end, they’d have a dance party.
Mira was a member of the National Honor Society, Mu Alpha Theta, the National English Honor Society, the Foreign Language Honor Society, Tri-M, the music honor society and the Science National Honor Society.
Mira is still considering her major but expects to do something in the sciences – biology or nursing are likely. Nursing is a two-year program so she can take all her required classes before going into her program. She wants to specialize as a nurse anesthetist.
After an injury her junior that required surgery, she considered orthopedics as a profession and even shadowed her orthopedic surgeon for a couple of months.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
