In my experience with teenagers, rarely do they ever get the opportunity to be in command. Adults seem to do it "to them" and "for them" but rarely "with them." When assigned a project, no one has the time to oversee and nurture the steps teens have to take from concept to project completion, so teens are rarely told to do anything totally on their own. In light of their limited experience, one cannot expect a teenager to know every aspect of problem solving and project planning. But as likely as not, the teacher is rare who will adopt a facilitating role and forgo being the "sage on the stage." To affirm that teens are able to successfully complete a major project on their own, a student group, SAIL, was organized at Edwards County High School.

SAIL (Students Active in Leadership) is a school-based, youth directed group organized in the fall of 1998 to learn leadership skills through the development and implementation of community service activities. SAIL members believe youth can be a vital part of the over-all service rendered to keep a community a vigorous and vibrant place for people to live and raise families.

The mission of SAIL is to learn leadership skills for use in later life through the development and performance of service activities that benefit the school and community and in so doing to improve the image of youth in the community. Based upon the mission, the group has the following focus: To learn leadership skills to improve our community, school, and the image of youth.

SAIL has some basic belief statements upon which the organization is built: (1) youth have worth; (2) we are the leaders of tomorrow; (3) with cooperation and collaboration, we can succeed; and (4) we can do what we resolve to do. As a capstone to the feelings of the group supported by the mission, focus, and belief statements, SAIL has adopted the following motto that drives its annual activities, "We can do that!" When doubt begins to creep into the conversation during a meeting, someone always comes forward to remind us of the SAIL motto, and the discussion gets back on a positive track.

Membership in SAIL

A SAIL group is comprised of 12 members. There are two chairs, one from the senior class and one from the junior class. The remaining members come from the four classes within the high school, each class having at least two members. Members are selected from faculty recommendations. Those recommended for membership are given the opportunity to complete an application to be submitted along with letters of recommendation from adults who know the prospective members. Letters of recommendation cannot be from family members. With the names removed, the applications and the letters of recommendation are presented to the group for selection as new members. Every precaution is made to keep the identity of the prospective new members from the group. It is the task of the senior class co-chair to prepare all documents and presentations associated with the acquisition of new members.

The difference between SAIL and most youth organizations is that SAIL is student driven and student governed. The adult sponsors' role is to provide a place to meet and act as liaison between SAIL and the community. As it was set up, the youth would run the organization and the adults would serve the youth. To the students of this conservative, rural southeastern Illinois community, the idea of the students determining the course of a school-sponsored organization is quite foreign. To this point in their lives, what these students have done at school and home has been strictly monitored by adults. To get students to move ahead on a project without total adult planning has been difficult

As one of the adult sponsors, I direct the activities of the SAIL group by asking questions. When the group seems to be going astray or are planning beyond their abilities to succeed, I ask questions to redirect their focus and thinking. Such questions may be directed toward funding sources for a project, facilities to accommodate their project, or the number of people needed to complete what they want to accomplish. By answering questions concerning the planning of a group activity, students are made to rethink aspects of the planning process. This rethinking requires that new decisions be made, and it avoids absolute obedience to the directives of an adult sponsor. These question/answer sessions can be very frustrating for the students who thought they had made workable plans. Though it may be difficult at times for the students to have to scrap existing plans and develop new ideas, the process of questioning and re-planning keeps the project securely in the hands of the students.

A major objective of SAIL is to introduce student leaders to the experience of collaborating with others to design and complete a project that will benefit a specific segment of the community. The experience is replete with all the frustrations, anxiety, joy, and the feelings of accomplishment or failure that come from working on a service-learning project. The program is designed to provide leadership skills for young people through the development and completion of real projects that improve the school and the community.

Teenagers have little social clout. As I have reminded the SAIL group many times, teens do not occupy a very high place on the social pecking order. In the eyes of most, teens have done little to prove that they deserve a social ranking and a place of any esteem on the social pecking order. At SAIL meetings, we emphasize that this desired recognition comes from the accomplishment of worthy deeds and only through hard work will students be recognized for their efforts.

SAIL Collaboration

Because of the lack of social clout and recognition, SAIL finds partners with whom they collaborate to achieve goals beyond their abilities. Among their collaborating partners are local businesses, county government, the local chamber of commerce, judges of the Illinois Second Judicial Circuit, and the Illinois Rural Health Association. The partners provide the means to accomplish more lofty goals; but of equal importance, these partners give credence to the ambitious projects undertaken by this group of high school students. By reporting successes in the local newspapers, SAIL is receiving recognition by the Regional Office of Education, the Illinois State Board of Education, the community, and neighboring school districts as a capable group of teenagers who can complete complicated and valuable service projects.

Two major projects that involved collaborative partners have been completed in the last three years. In the fall of 1999, SAIL collaborated with the judges of the Second Judicial Circuit to design and implement a Safe School seminar for the 21 high schools within the judicial circuit. As a result of attending, the school teams were made aware of the possible dangers to schools in the shadow of the national incidents of school violence. Through the use of large and small group sessions, school teams were given the tools necessary to go back to their schools and evaluate the safety measures currently in place and be able to voice concerns they have with the school administration. SAIL received a 1999 Governors' Hometown Award for outstanding volunteerism with the Safe School Seminar project.

As a result of the success of the Safe School Seminar, four members of the SAIL group were invited to Washington, DC, by our local US congressman to be part of the national youth seminar on safe schools. This opportunity allowed some members of SAIL to work with federal legislators on the topic of school safety. They were allowed to add their experience to the discussion on safe schools by students from around the country.

The second major project was an advocacy seminar that taught those in attendance how to constructively advocate for change in their community. The students chose Kid Care, a state funded insurance program for children of low-income families and for pregnant woman, as a focus for advocating change within their communities. By attending the seminar, students were given the tools needed to go back to their respective communities and raise the awareness of this valuable insurance program to try to influence those eligible to enroll for the coverage.

The idea of advocacy was quite abstract to the students, so long hours of work and research went into the preparation of the seminar. Again, a series of large and small group sessions were used to provide the attendees the skills to return to their communities and advocate for Kid Care coverage. The officials in the Governor's Office where Kid Care originated commented that the seminar could serve as a model to raise awareness levels of government programs in the less populated southern counties of the state where public services are underused.

SAIL was originally approached by the president of the Illinois Rural Health Association to develop the seminar on advocacy because of the success and publicity of the Safe Schools seminar the year prior. The idea was to offer the advocacy seminar to the high schools in that part of the state making up the 2nd and 20th Regional Offices of Education. The area includes 13 southern and southeastern Illinois counties and 28 separate high schools. As a result of the SAIL group involvement with the advocacy seminar, the group was awarded the Illinois Rural Heath Association President's Citation Award.

Teaching responsibility and leadership cannot be done from a text. Experience is the text. Success and failure are the teachers. From the failures and successes the students start to realize what works and what does not. The adults teaching these students must be willing to give up total control and allow the students to create their own success. More importantly, teachers must allow these students to live with and learn from their failures. Teaching leadership is not a two-week lesson to be followed by a test. Leadership is an ongoing concept that students must live through via vehicles like the seminars designed and implemented by SAIL. As the success of these projects becomes widely known, the student participants will be invited to be part of larger and more important projects where what they have learned will be put to the test. This is how leadership is learned.

Summary

Schools looking for ways to empower teens as leaders should give serious consideration to student led projects in service learning. The Edwards County High School experience with student leadership has positioned our students to collaborate with local, regional, and national entities on a variety of issues and to advocate for underprivileged youth and their families. The students are developing leadership skills through solving real problems in real contexts. They are providing leadership to their school, community, state and nation.