Leader In Me

It isn't often that someone can send a 9-year-old as a replacement speaker and it works perfectly.
Kim Cummins was at one point scheduled to serve as guest speaker for Tuesday’s meeting of the Rotary Club of Crowley. When she realized she wouldn’t be able to make it, she called upon not only a girl with great knowledge of the Leader in Me Program, but a program participant.
Leah McDowell has long-since been one of Martin Petitjean Elementary School’s shining examples of the great success the program has created. That’s why she has spoken at educational symposiums with 500 or 1,000 educators sitting, staring and listening to her every word.

A first grader calls to attention her fellow classmates with one simple word.
“Class?”
“Yes?” they respond in unison.
She calls them to attention once more as they prepare to show off Stephen R. Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” to a room full of community and business leaders from across the southern part of the state.
The habits are sandwiched between a sentence that the students are not just saying because they were taught it, but because they believe it.
“I am a leader!”
And it is through that — the Leader in Me Program — that local schools Ross Elementary and Martin Petitjean Elementary, as well as other schools, have really found their way.