Military Academy cadets from West Point will host a Leadership and Ethics Workshop for local high school students Friday, Feb. 21, from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at River View Theater, 600 Clyde Fant Parkway.
More than 160 high school students will be challenged to lead diverse groups, solve problems and make value-based decisions in an atmosphere of friendly competition.
Katie Felder, West Point public affairs specialist, said they are working to bring the workshop to town through the office of Shreveport Mayor Adrian Perkins, himself a graduate from West Point.
The leadership workshop will be led by a group of 12 West Point cadets, including two from Louisiana, although not from the Shreveport area.
“We do this all over the country,” Felder said. “It gives them the opportunity to teach other young people about leadership and ethics.” The students and local educators are also given information about West Point, although she said the work shop is not a recruitment tool.
What distinguishes West Point’s leadership workshop from similar events? “It’s more than just about self-esteem. It’s about leading an ethical life in a technology-driven environment,” she said. The cadets are “probably just a few years older than the actual high school students so that makes it a little different. And also it gives them exposure to something outside of Shreveport. A lot of people don’t know anything about West Point.”
What will the students experience during the workshop? “There are team-building experiences that are broken down into classrooms, and they talk about ethics. You know, what would you do in this situation? And there are even competitions, and it’s all cadet-driven,” Felder said.
Because the workshop is led by West Point cadets, is there a military component to the event? “No, it’s very generic,” she said. “We don’t even come with the intent of recruiting. It’s just to give back to the community.
“It’s a very worthwhile program. We did it in Los Angeles, we’ve been to Detroit. We’ve been doing these programs now for probably about 15 years, and normally, the West Point societies that are in each community, they partner up and help us get our locale, but in this particular instance, because the mayor is from West Point, he wanted to bring it (to Shreveport) so that the high school students could be exposed to it, because he’s seen it work, and we’re glad to come down and support him, too.”
What sort of response does West Point get from these events, and how does it measure its impact? “You can see the impact on the students’ faces that day,” she said. There are competitions between different teams, and prizes are awarded.
At the end of the day, students tell about what they’ve learned, “and you can see that they’ve changed in terms of, like, how they view different situations, they’ll be given scenarios to try to figure out, and you can see the growth. But also oftentimes, we can tell when people reach back out to us and decide they want to know more about West Point, or they want to know more about things in their community that can draw them to more leadership opportunities, which we try to help with, too,” Felder said.
THIS ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED IN THE February 14 ISSUE OF THE INQUISITOR.