WORLD LANGUAGES: Sara Paredes
Miami Palmetto Senior High senior and Polyglot World Languages Silver Knight nominee Sara Paredes has left her mark on her community with an all-girls club for middle schoolers.
Growing up in an empowering household with female leaders as role models and mentors, Paredes found inspiration and passion for her project: The ‘No Apologies’ Project. Paredes has worked on this project since her sophomore year at MPSH, striving to teach young girls foundational skills not taught in the classroom.
“I’ve always grown up learning the foundations of what it means to be a confident public speaker and expressing yourself in ways that make you look your best,” Paredes said.
Paredes came to the realization that middle school is one of the hardest ages of development for young girls: believing it is vital for them to have a safe space and a unique way to make friends and mentors outside of their school environment.
“I created a curriculum and a set of modules on educating young girls on public speaking skills, confident body language expression and ways to create a network and meet new people. How you talk to adults and how you interact with professionals and that kind of thing, email writing and [things like that] for eighth-grade girls primarily,” Paredes said.
However, this journey has not reached its level of success without its fair share of obstacles and hurdles along the way. Paredes’ main struggle throughout the journey had originally been retaining members of the club and reaching out to students.
“I would go to [Palmetto Middle] after school and give out flyers in front of the school. I emailed every single teacher on campus,” Paredes said. “I would go into classrooms, I had to do a lot of things, really make an effort to get kids to show up.”
Living in an Ecuadorian and multicultural household, Paredes had always immersed herself in a world of blended cultures and traditions. She spent part of her summer working at the Cheyenne River Reservation in Dupree, S.D., and experienced powerful cultural exchanges with the Lakota people and those of Native American backgrounds. As her nominated category is World Languages, Paredes speaks three — English, Spanish and French — and enjoys immersing herself in new cultures.
“I actually interned in the office of the mayor of Quito over the summer of my junior year. So I was spending time working with the mayor there,” Paredes said. “I got to experience global politics in a way I hadn’t before, and I got to compare that to how the government functions in the U.S..”
While serving as the Editor-in-Chief of The Panther and President of the French Honor Society, Paredes also finds time to play the flute, an instrument she has played the past 10 years of her life.
“To me, music has always been a language, and I’ve always considered reading music to be a really serious privilege. Not everybody can, and it’s a very difficult thing to learn to do,” Paredes said.
VOCATIONAL TECHNICAL: Alessandra Falcon
Through viewing the world through the eyes of the needy and touching into her compassion, Miami Palmetto Senior High senior and piano “master” Alessandra Falcon is the Vocational Technical nominee at the forefront of her service project, Harmony for Hope.
This project found its birthplace during car rides around Miami, where Falcon would spend her time waiting at lights, hoping there could be some way she could give back to the homeless who spend their weeks asking for aid from the passing drivers. Falcon did not intend to give back through loose change; she saw a bigger problem that needed to be solved.
“It’s bad to just give them a couple of dollars, because it really doesn’t help, maybe a little bit. There’s so much more that people can do. And I know that giving money is not always the right answer, because they might not know what to do with that money. So basically, I was like, ‘Oh, like, I could definitely do something like this’,” Falcon said.
When beginning this project in tenth grade, Falcon was a solo worker. Starting with using her job as a piano instructor as a means of donation, Falcon would use her funding and donate it to organizations. Later, as Falcon slowly built up her team, so did her events.
“… I started doing the car washes over the summer. And then I met more people, and I started doing more in [MPSH], and I got my friends from other schools [to join]. So it was kind of just like that train from [the] bottom-up, from having my own money, and then slowly being able to reach out to other people and reach out to other volunteers that want to help, and then expanding it from there,” Falcon said.
Inspired by her family’s background, Falcon always strives to make sure people are getting everything that they need through her project.
“I come from a Cuban background, and so seeing how my grandparents were raised in the area that they used to live in, it’s kind of like these people could have a better quality of life, and so I decided to do something,” Falcon said.
The category of Vocational Technical for Silver Knight highlights the ability to teach others, and Falcon has displayed those exact characteristics. Outside of MPSH, Falcon is a certified substitute teacher, subbing at her old academy, Sharp Minds, and gives music lessons to students through the Pinecrest City Music Project.
“I teach for a couple organizations. I teach for Pinecrest City Music Projects and also the academy where I was taught at, and I got my teacher certification. I’ve been a substitute teacher for them. I teach the curriculum of music theory and piano to students that range from four to 15. So those are my two main jobs,” Falcon said.
This is not the only way Falcon gives back to her community. Inside MPSH’s walls, she is constantly involved with school clubs and activities, such as Health Occupation Students of America, Science National Honor Society and Health Information Project, among various other extracurriculars.
While she is an extremely busy student, one club in particular has a special place in her heart and has pushed her to pursue a career connected to it in the future.
“I’m president of HOSA now … I want to go into pre-med, and I plan to be a surgeon just kind of, like having that background of inclusivity and applying that to healthcare will definitely lead me in the process of becoming a better surgeon, not only one that treats but that’s only that’s also empathetic to others, sits there really understands you, not just [like] ‘I’m going to treat you’, but having that sense of understanding of where people come from,” Falcon said.
