Leaders Involved in Networking Kids

 

             The Unionville L.I.N.K. (Leaders Involved in Networking Kids) program provides a personal growth experience for forty ninth and tenth grade students. The weekend experience is designed to provide opportunities for the students to demonstrate and develop a variety of interpersonal skills including leadership, communication, awareness of self and others, and informed decision making.

             Nomination forms are distributed to all high school administrators and staff as well as every current student L.I.N.K.er (@ 200 students). The names of the students being recommended as well as reasons for the recommendation are requested. The nomination form has space for but is not limited to five nominees. Many of the nominations include personal perspectives of the person making the nomination.

             Both the staff and the L.I.N.K.ers take the nominations very seriously and try to recommend students who they feel will benefit from the L.I.N.K. experience. Many of the adult staff at the high school have gone on L.I.N.K. weekends and many on more than one. This gives them a better perspective as to who to nominate. It is a wish that every student could experience a L.I.N.K. weekend.

             All nomination forms are submitted to the adult L.I.N.K. advisors and the name of every nominee is recorded. A record of who is nominating the student and how many of each type of nomination they receive is kept. Any special circumstances are noted and taken into consideration.

             The L.I.N.K. advisors develop a list of ten boys and ten girls from ninth and tenth grade for a total of forty new L.I.N.K.ers. A list of alternates for each group is also developed. The advisors now check any sport or major activity conflicts with a student’s schedule that might prevent them from participating in the weekend. Coaches and advisors are contacted to see if we can invite a student who many have a conflict with a game, match, practice, or performance. We do not intentionally want to put students in a situation where they would have to choose between their previous commitment and L.I.N.K. You can imagine the scope of trying to coordinate this intent so occasionally, it does happen. We respect the decision of the coach or advisor and will not invite those students who would have been otherwise.

             We try to be fair and equitable in the selection process. We try to make sure that students are not chosen based on popularity. We do consider students’ personal requests who seriously want to be in L.I.N.K. Students can nominate themselves by writing a short paragraph explaining why they want to be in L.I.N.K. We try to select students from all walks of student life.

 

 

Nomination and Selection Process