Central Coast students to participate in regional leadership conference

Faced with a new COVID campus culture after months of disconnect, more than 500 students from King City to Santa Cruz are coming together Thursday to generate some good old-fashioned spirit at this year’s California Association of Directors of Activities Student Leadership Conference.

A hub of collaboration and pride, the annual event located at the Salinas Community Center encourages middle and high school leadership students to share ideas across campuses, districts and even counties, an especially important opportunity as schools continue to face challenges with the pandemic.

“Having students connect to something is of the utmost importance right now,” said Lori Lowenson, California Association of Directors of Activities council member. “I think it will be good for students to network with one another, see what can be done safely and hear about what other schools are doing to make sure everyone feels motivated and included.”

With a keynote address from motivational speaker Remy Meraz, breakout sessions led by students and a day’s worth of learning activities, Thursday’s conference is designed to give young leaders ways to improve engagement and enthusiasm at their relative school sites. Part of that means listening to and even taking from peers, as participants are poised to present projects and campaigns unique to their own campuses for others in the audience to take home, adapt and implement themselves.

“Sometimes students worry about stealing from other schools,” said Lowenson, who is also the activities director for North Monterey County High School. “But the idea is that we’re sharing with everyone else. Just because it works in one place doesn’t mean it can’t work anywhere else. We shouldn’t keep great ideas to ourselves.”

Providing a space to discuss common problems and solutions has been a pillar of the California Association of Directors of Activities since the organization was established in 1957. The Central Coast leadership conference is just one of several conferences the network holds each year in different areas across the state.

Thursday’s event will be North Monterey County High senior Joshua Garcia’s first glimpse at this kind of student networking despite being involved in ASB for the past three years. Having spent months leading his school from behind a computer screen, Garcia is anxious to talk to other students who faced a similar challenge of encouraging involvement amidst COVID.

“It’s been a pretty hard task maintaining a leadership role when freshman and sophomores haven’t even been to our school before,” he said. “I’m really looking forward to engaging with other students. I want to see how they’ve been handling the difficult process of getting students more involved again so we can do the same here.”