Casebrook Student Leaders excel at PYD

By Nick Leith | Posted: Wednesday May 2, 2018

This experience is an important part of establishing our student leadership team culture - working together to make Casebrook a place where students have a powerful and active voice.

Eight House captains, 14 class leaders, six student council leaders, and our two Kapa Haka leaders spent Wednesday and Thursday at 'Te Koru' (PYD) in Papanui during the last week of term.

Students were engaged in loads of discussion, team work, challenging activities such as rock climbing, lunch with special education students, and finally presenting their experience through speeches to a large number of parents and our principal, Mrs Keen.

Student highlights included:

Leadership camp was a great opportunity to know each other and to find out how to be a great leader. I learnt about other great leaders as well. And I’ve never heard the "I have a dream" speech so it was a great opportunity. - Zahra Asghari 

I enjoyed being with other leaders and becoming a better leader. It taught me how to communicate better and speak up. Making friends there was great.  - Charlotte O'Leary De Malmanche. 

The PYD leadership course was a great opportunity to expand my leadership skills further and to learn how to use these skills in life. The climbing wall was my favourite part of the course but also a challenge due relying on your partner to stop you falling. This was an amazing opportunity and I would encourage other leaders to take this opportunity if it was given. - Alex MacDonald 

I enjoyed this leadership camp because it was a great opportunity to be part of and I had a really fun time meeting new people and learning how to be a better leader. I found the speech really fun because I could share all of my experience with others. - Amber Davis

The leadership camp was an awesome experience for me to learn about the habits of a leader and what I should work on. The crew at the PYD were really helpful and helped with any problems and taught us things we needed for our future to be better, we were also inspired by them and people they talked to us about, people like Walt Disney and Martin Luther King Jr. In general, it was a big step into leadership. -  Ethan Hamilton

This experience sets up our students for a year of pro-active leadership and builds the confidence we want our young leaders to have in our school.

We would like to thank Hamish and Tom for their facilitation of the course and especially the food. Leadership on a full stomach is so much easier!

We are very fortunate to have a local community organisation such as PYD working with our Casebrook REPS. We are also very fortunate to have the Chch City Council supporting our leadership development through their youth development scheme which enables us to keep expense for parents low.

Nick Leith

Image Gallery