Palmetto High School junior Gracie Paredes won the Barnard Book Award at the Palmetto Awards ceremony late last month. In the past, Paredes won the PTSA Leadership Award and the Panther on the Move Award.
She’s a familiar figure on campus for her role as an athletic trainer. She stays after school three days a week to help athletes with their rehabilitation exercises, or to perform first aid to those athletes injured in practice.
“We go to all the football games,” she says.
When an athlete comes off the field, she will help them if they need first aid.
“After they get cuts, when they have muscle cramps, when they need stretching,” she says. “We also work in rehab. We make sure we follow proper protocol to get them back to their strength.”
She started as a trainer the summer before her freshman year.
“It’s very time consuming but very rewarding,” she says. “Helping injured athletes. Seeing them get better, grow stronger, seeing them back on the field.”
She hopes to go into medicine in the future.
Although being a trainer leaves her with little free time, Paredes is a member of the National Honor Society, the French Honor Society and the Spanish Honor Society. She’s an officer in Key Club. She’s been treasurer and is running for president of the community service club.
She’s also a part of the Health Information Project (HIP) Club. The purpose of the club is to teach freshman about health and health related issues.
“We meet once every other week,” she says. “The in-between weeks we teach the kids.”
She says teaching the freshmen at first is a little intimidating but she became more comfortable as they began to make a connection with the younger students.
“I enjoyed teaching them and felt I was doing something important,” she says. “I felt I was making an impact in their health education.”
Because the topics can be difficult, the students are asked to write down questions so can be asked anonymously.
“A lot of times they were serious questions that they couldn’t ask their parents or teachers,” Paredes says. “We did have some come up after class wanting more information.”
Education important to her so she’s collecting school supplies for children in Ecuador. She is helping children in a kindergarten through fifth grade school with basic supplies.
“I started collecting two months ago,” she says. “I invested my own money and I went to Ecuador. I have family there.”
Her sister started the collection project four years ago and she inherited the project when her sister went to college. Parades says the kids can’t succeed and make a better life for themselves if they don’t have an education and they can’t get that education if they don’t have basic supplies such as pencils and paper.
Paredes has been raising money for the school supply drive by selling bracelets made by Ecuadorian women
“I wanted to make more impact with the bracelets I can increase the amount of supplies I can give,” she says, adding that if she makes enough money from the sales, she can expand the program to at least one more school.
Her dad will ship the supplies to Ecuador and she will distribute them when she goes in August.
Last summer, she completed an internship at Boston University in Bio-engineering. She will go again this summer for two weeks.
She’s defining the criteria for her college list. Right now, her list includes Princeton, Barnard, Northwestern, and Tulane.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
