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Incoming Miami Palmetto High School senior Amber Garcia won the iPrep Outstanding Junior award at the end of the year awards ceremony shortly before the end of the 2021-2022 school year.
The magnet program students do Florida Virtual School classes in technology as well as taking classes in social media, Leadership and other important subjects.
“The main thing is working with your computer and with technology,” she says. “Once you become a junior or senior you have the opportunity to intern.”
Garcia did not intern her junior year but plans to intern her senior year at Village Pines, a private school that teaches children from Pre-K to fifth grade. She chose the school because she used to attend it for preschool.
She’ll go to the internship instead of attending the iPrep class. She’ll assist the teachers and work with the students who need help.
“I’ve always been interested in becoming a teacher of some sort,” she says.
Over her high school career, Garcia has already earned more than 1,000 community service hours.
“I went to a dog shelter every Saturday for two years,” she says. “I’d be there from 11 to 5 p.m.”
Her high school community service project was unofficially called the Kennel Card Project.
It was predicated on her experiences adopting a dog six years ago from the Born Free Pet Shelter.
Garcia says while the organization is quite small, the facility is huge, on five acres.
“It’s all outside and completely volunteer run,” she says. “I created this organization project. There were six different sections and around 100 dogs. There was no way of organizing where the dogs were. Nobody had a set plan. My project was to come up with some sort of organization.”
The system she created used numbered color-coded kennels with cards that listed each dog, which breed it was and in which kennel the dog could be found.
“I updated kennel cards and a site plan every week for what dogs were there,” she says. “You would always have your update and know where every single dog was in the place.”
Garcia also painted kennel doors which was the most time-consuming aspect.
She began her volunteer work in ninth grade, as soon as she was old enough.
“I contacted the head volunteer,” she says. “She told me what they needed, and I came up with a plan. I love organizing. I knew that would be super easy. So I color coded and numbered everything.”
These days, Garcia volunteers at Paws 4 You Rescue.
“I carried over my ideas from Born Free like kennel cards and I help update photo books for all the dogs for adoption events,” she says. “It’s a picture with information of every dog the shelter has.”
The dog picture book is taken to PetSmart and other adoption events.
“It helps a lot of the people who are there,” she says.
At Palmetto, she is in the National Honor Society, Psi Alpha, and the Class of 2023 Cabinet. She also plays on the Palmetto soccer team. She played on the junior varsity in ninth and tenth grades and moved up to varsity her junior year.
“I just play at school,” she says. “It helps me focus on the school part of my life. I could still have my fun, but I could still focus on my academics.”
As a rising senior, she’s thinking about colleges. She plans to apply to Florida schools to take advantage of Florida Pre-Paid and Bright Futures Scholarships, which she has already qualified for.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
