Never had Kaitlynn Smart taken off from school for an extended weekend to go to camp until she was invited to a Rotary Youth Leadership Awards summit.
Held every April at The Vines Center in Ferndale, a short drive west from Little Rock, the camp has all the makings of a summer program, from canoeing to rock climbing — activities that challenge the mind and body.
“There’s a giant ladder and it just gets bigger the higher you go,” said Smart, a senior at Watson Chapel High School. “There are small activities, too, just team bonding things like walking on a balance beam, trying to figure out how to put it together to get to the other side.”
The message behind it all, Smart said, was bonding.
Smart and classmate Cheyenne Ford returned to RYLA last week not as RYLAtarians, as the campers are called, but as counselors helping to ensure the newest campers have a great time. This year’s RYLA was held April 10-13 and included high schoolers from across Rotary District 6170, which covers western and most of south Arkansas.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
The students who attended RYLA were honored Thursday at a joint banquet of the Pine Bluff and West Pine Bluff chapters of Rotary International.
“Everything they taught me as a camper, all the leadership things, I took it back and I did 10 times better than I did last year,” Smart said.
Smart said she gained much confidence from attending as a camper. “You’re around a whole bunch of people you don’t know. You put yourself out there and you just gain from it,” she said.
This year, it was Christian Heggie’s, Jessica Parker’s and Terrance Wyrick’s turns to be RYLAtarians.
Heggie, a sophomore and track athlete at White Hall High School, said he took from the camp the value of trust.
“You can’t trust a lot of people,” he said. “I trust these kids with my heart because we were climbing and ziplining in trees and stuff. I took the trustworthy part out of the leadership.”
The theme of trust also resonated with Parker, a Watson Chapel junior. She put her trust in friends during a canoeing adventure, and as it turned out, “we were going down that lake like it was nothing.”
Trust and leadership also came in handy.
“I gathered friendship and leadership skills,” Parker said. “With the leadership skills, they gave us multiple opportunities to be in teams. Somebody had to take initiative sometimes, so sometimes it would be me, and I had to learn to be a team player as well, because someone else would have to take initiative and I would have to sit back and listen to what they have to say because it may benefit me and the team.”
For Parker’s classmate Wyrick, RYLA was a chance to network with other leaders.
“I was in a group where other leaders were also present, so I got to learn from them and they got to learn from me and I got to build new connections because life is all about who you know,” he said. “The fact that I get to know them at this age, hopefully we all cross paths again in the future because they were all bright leaders at that camp.”
Roy Ferrell, sergeant-at-arms for Rotary’s West Pine Bluff chapter, said Rotary members went to each school and asked school leaders and counselors to nominate students, or as he put it, “the best resources we could invest in that would come back and bring value to school.” The applications from students are then sent to the local Rotary chapters’ district office.
“I’m definitely thankful to the Pine Bluff Rotary Club and West Pine Bluff Rotary Club for sponsoring me and every other student that went,” said Pine Bluff High School senior Xzaeviun Sims. “It’s an experience every student deserves, but the cream of the crop get to go, so let’s inspire more.”
While Sims enjoyed his time as a camper, being a counselor this time around was no easy task.
“The other two male counselors had to go because they had prom. They had to leave,” he said. “That left me as the only counselor and the directors. That’s 30 guys we had to take care of, but we got it done.”
The counselor experience was better than camping, the way Ford saw it.
“I loved being a camper, but being a counselor, you have a lot more freedom to do stuff,” Ford said. “It’s just more fun because you don’t necessarily have to do the activities but it’s fun because your campers are going to want you to do it. You’re their motivation, and they want to see you do it first.”