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Miami Palmetto High School rising senior Rodrigo Prera has a community service project called Backpacks Beyond Borders.
“I’m collaborating with Pinecrest Elementary,” he says. “At the end of the year, I send them all of my flyers. There were two boxes at the back of the school and one in the office. We donate the used backpacks to Haiti.”
The first year they collected 60-70 backpacks and about the same number this past school year.
“I would take them back home and clear everything inside of them,” he says. “I organize them in a box. I would take to them to this organization and ship them to Haiti. They have an organization that helps people.”
He starts the collection two weeks before the end of school. He says he receives the majority of the backpacks the last four days of school.
“It takes me three hours to clear them all and then I put them in boxes again so I can ship them out,” he says.
Originally, he planned to send the backpacks to Guatemala. He expected to work with a specific organization there but discovered that shipping to Guatemala was costly. After checking around, Prera found an organization that would ship to Haiti without cost.
He plans to do the collection one more time at the end of the upcoming school year. In the meantime, he plans to find another student to take over the project before he graduates.
He’s helped Guatemala in other ways. He worked with the International Esperanza Project and spent four days with other kids going into homes and building stoves. He helped not only with the physical labor but also helped translate.
“I’m from Guatemala and I was already there on vacation. A lot of people from Guatemala do this project. When I went there were kids from Texas and kids from Guatemala,” he says.
For community service, Prera volunteers every summer at the Westminster Soccer Camp. He played soccer for about 12 years but stopped his sophomore year.
Since then, he became a referee for Pinecrest Premier and in his junior year he became a full-time coach for Pinecrest Premier.
He joined the Palmetto badminton team that same year, playing singles and doubles, but primarily doubles.
“It’s less consuming than soccer was,” he says.
This year he expects to get more playing time because he’s a senior.
He’s the secretary of both the Finance Club and the Business Honor Society and he is on the Class of ’27 Cabinet. He’s a member of the Social Science National Honor Society and participates in History Bee competitions.
He’s also the chair parliamentarian of the Student Council.
“We have three at Palmetto,” he says. “We want to make sure the meetings start on time, that the meetings flow and that we don’t have interruptions and that everyone know they have a voice.”
He says his favorite club is the Health Information Project, where he is a peer health educator.
“I talked to the underclassmen about the dangers of drugs, what are good foods or bad foods, and how to handle emotions,” he says. “Such as who to go to if you are feeling a certain type of way.”
The health classes were helpful when he was a ninth grader, and he wanted to continue to educate the students about health issues.
Currently, he’s deciding on whether to major in Civil Engineering, Finance or Economics in college. His application list includes the University of Florida, Florida State, Georgia Tech, the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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