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Link Crew leads to leaders and friends
AUSTINTOWN
As 400 freshmen prepare for high school, juniors and seniors prepare for a nontraditional welcome – one with open arms.
Ninety-eight students will be leaders in Link Crew, a national program dedicated to breaking down barriers and helping the transition from middle school to high school seem less daunting.
Dave Purins, Fitch High School assistant principal, said because Fitch staff members are dedicated to developing and accepting the gifts that everyone has, leaders were chosen to be representative of the entire student body.
“It’s a really eclectic group,” he said.
Link Leaders are involved in a variety of activities and clubs, and are dedicated to promoting extracurricular involvement for freshmen.
In addition, the mentoring opportunity will help grow friendships and provide a “middle man” resource for students who need help.
Cami Hefner, Link Leader and senior, said she wished the program was there when she was a freshman.
“I just had no clue where to go, and I felt like I had no one to go to,” she said.
Link Leader Marquis Barbel, a senior, said he wanted to help provide comfort to those students who feel like Hefner did.
“I don’t want anybody to be alone,” he said.
Link Leader Tom Drabison, a junior, said he wanted to give tips and help get rid of “unnecessary failure.”
“Little things like walking on the right side of the hallway makes life a lot easier,” he said.
Drabison said, however, he understood some things would have to be learned by doing and failing.
“You have to fail to understand how to succeed,” he said.
Barbel agreed and said the success comes from reaching outside of one’s comfort zone.
“You don’t succeed if you don’t get out of your comfort zone,” he said.
In the fall, 98 Link Leaders will be trained in how to help their freshmen groups of 10 and when to bring issues to the adults. The leaders will take their training to the 8 a.m. to noon Aug. 23 freshmen orientation. Freshmen students will meet with their Link Leaders and participate in team-building exercises to help ease out of their comfort zones.
“The stronger they connect, the stronger team is going to be,” Purins said.
Hefner said she thinks not only will the program bring the ninth-grade class together, but it will also bring the senior class together.
“We’ll all be more of a family, and that’s something Austintown tries to create,” she said.
Purins said the goal of the group is to deconstruct any negative connotations people have from starting school.
“It’s motivating for us as adults to see excitement in young people to make a change,” Purins said. “One change is that now the cool thing to do is to accept one another.”
Austintown Middle School is also implementing a similar program mentored by eighth-grade students for sixth-grade students entering the school.
“We have a tremendous amount of amazing kids who volunteered to be difference makers,” Purins said. “What I see in them, the leaders, is that they don’t always want to own up to big things they do. They really do so many awesome things, and this is just one of them.”
Long-term, Purins said he hopes the program will increase school attendance.
“We want them to know we want kids in school,” he said. “We want to make incoming freshmen feel connected and linked to school and community. ... We want them to get the message that we’re excited to have them and can’t wait to get them here [to Fitch].”
According to boomerangproject.com, Link Crew’s parent site, freshmen are the largest at-risk population in high school because students fail ninth grade more than any other grade.
“Low attendance during the first 30 days of the ninth- grade year is a stronger indicator that a student will drop out than any other eighth-grade predictor, including test scores, other academic achievement and age,” the site said.
The program also gives the Link Leaders, who are still part of the student body, the opportunity to lead.
“We really wanted to allow them [Link Leaders] to have an impact currently on the school and to have something to leave behind,” Purins said.