Photo by Chris Sykes Rahmel Johnson, rear, and Orange Board of Education member Kylisha Hill, third from left, stand with a few of the students who heard their presentation on Saturday, Nov. 19, at the Orange public schools’ eighth annual Teen Summit.
Rahmel Johnson, rear, and Orange Board of Education member Kylisha Hill, third from left, stand with a few of the students who heard their presentation on Saturday, Nov. 19, at the Orange public schools’ eighth annual Teen Summit.
ORANGE, NJ — When Orange’s public schools hosted its seventh annual Teen Summit at Lincoln Avenue Elementary School on Saturday, Nov. 19, it was different from those that had preceded it for a number of reasons.
“We didn’t do Friday; we just did Saturday, one day,” said Teen Summit founder Laura Sacks, who is also a nurse at Orange Preparatory Academy, on Saturday, Nov. 19. “I mixed it up, because we’re having a catered dinner. The day’s longer. It’s going to 7:30 p.m. We’re going to have a dance competition at the end. We made the Saturday longer.”
This year’s summit also featured a change in format that Sacks and volunteer Lynne Mondestin, a district math teacher, said was designed to make it bigger, better and more relevant than ever.
“I organized this little adventure over here; this is our seventh Teen Summit and I wouldn’t do this summit without (Mondestin), because she keeps it together,” Sacks said Saturday, Nov. 19. “It’s sort of a lot of work. We have to fight for everything; every detail we have to fight do this. But we’re blessed because the district supports us and they back us and it’s really cool for the kids. I really think the kids love it. We were concerned that the tough kids wouldn’t come, but even tough kids come.”
Despite the changes to this year’s installment of the Teen Summit, Mondestin said the goal remained the same. The last time she and Sacks changed the event’s format, they did it by expanding the program to include students and their parents, which seems to be working well.
“I think, this year, there were more than before, so hopefully, each year, it gets bigger and bigger, with the parents coming in with the hope that we can kind of equal it out and get the parents to have the kind of big experience that the students are having as well,” said Mondestin on Saturday, Nov. 19. “When a child is motivated to learn and they have people pushing them to be their best, they can do anything that they want to do. You just have to not give them everything; teach them how to work for what they want and you’ll prepare them for the next level, because they’ll be able to do things on their own. They’ll be self-sufficient.”
Troy Bell, the seventh- and eighth-grade choir director at Cicely Tyson School in East Orange, came out to help Sacks and Mondestin with the Teen Summit and said he would not have missed the opportunity for anything in the world — and he meant it.
“My son is performing on Broadway today, but I’m here in Orange at the Teen Summit, because this is the place to be,” said Bell on Saturday, Nov. 19. “It’s a wonderful program that sponsors the city of Orange youth. We target all the youth of Orange, from sixth grade to 12th grade. We do positive workshops to instill a different perspective on life, a different outlook in them. We try to instill hope. We try to instill values. And we try to encourage them by bringing inspiring speakers and success stories from the city of Orange, musical guests, the whole 9 yards.”
Lenny Williams is a professor of business at New Jersey City University and a public speaker who was tapped to make a presentation at the Summit.
“I’m just here to motivate the students and let them know that I was, at one time, not a great student and I was able to come back and get a couple of degrees and become a professor at a very young age,” said Williams on Saturday, Nov. 19. “I teach management, marketing and entrepreneurship. I’m from Linden and the first piece is to get the kids to understand that education can literally take you wherever you want to go. You want to go into sports, pop culture, be a doctor; it can take you there.”
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