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Senior Mackenzie Floyd is Westminster Christian School’s Silver Knight nominee in the General Scholarship category. Next year she’s attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She’ll be in Honors Carolina, the honors program. She plans to major in Neuroscience for a career in the medical field.
At Westminster, she collaborated with a teacher at the elementary school to create the Author Academy, a creative writing program that has since grown to include children from third through fifth grade.
“I recruited other students to mentor the kids and work with them weekly and to be there for multiple years,” she says.
Now they have about 15 elementary students, five or so mentors and two teachers involved in the program.
“This year we’re publishing a quarterly newsletter,” she says. “Last year we entered into creative writing competitions. We wrote an ABC book for the preschoolers at Westminster.”
They prepared the students to write their books.
“We start out reading a mentor text and they have writer’s notebooks,” she says. “We ask them to try it for themselves. Then we go individually, and they work on their own stories or the newsletter.”
They also have a Spoken Word night, where the students present everything they have worked on throughout the year.
The students in the Author Academy took two field trips to the Everglades Foundation and Black Point Marina to gather information on the Everglades for the next quarterly newsletter.
Floyd’s community service includes her work as president of Twenty Little Working Girls.
The community service organization recently raised more than $900 in their annual bake sale, which is just a part of the approximate $20,000 they raise annually.
The money raised is distributed to various charities. The girls also volunteer at different events most weekends, including events at the Chapman Partnership for the Homeless and Glory House.
“I do a lot of volunteer shifts,” she says.
Through Twenty Little Working Girls, Floyd volunteers at Breakthrough Miami twice a month. She goes to the one at Carrolton School for the Sacred Heart.
At school, she’s captain of the cheer team.
“I lead the team in calling cheers,” she says. “We lead most of the practices. We practice almost every day except for Thursdays and Fridays are our games.”
She’s also co-president of the Student Ambassadors Association, an organization that she helped start.
“We give tours on open house days,” she says. “I’m one of the student speakers for the tours. We have given smaller, more personal tours as Student Ambassadors this semester.”
In addition to all her other school commitments, she’s on the school’s leadership team.
“I’m head of the spirit committee,” she says. “We plan prom, homecoming, homecoming week. We negotiate with vendors. And we plan pep rallies. I started leadership my sophomore year.”
She was on the spiritual development committee in tenth grade and then the spirit committee for the past two years.
“Everything is student run,” she says. I’m the one who sends the emails, sets the prices, gets the contracts.”
She is a member of the National Honor Society, Rho Kappa, Mu Alpha Theta, the National English Honor Society, the World Language National Honor Society and Thespian Honor Society. She’s president of the Science National Honor Society.
Her research project through the Advanced Placement Capstone program covered ADHD and Adolescents.
“How pediatricians talk to teens about ADHD, and how that discussion affects the way the adolescent perceives the diagnosis,” she says.
The research has been published in The Journal of Student Research.
Floyd is the managing editor of the Beacon, the school yearbook.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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