KILEEN, Texas — Destiny Perez is a junior at Killeen High School and a military brat with a father in the Army. She also was recently just one of ten students worldwide to receive a scholarship from the Military Child Education Coalition to participate in the Frances Hesselbein Student Leadership program.
"I was ultimately very excited and honestly very grateful for the opportunity," she told 25 News.
"The fact that I got picked, especially being the only person from our ISD, it felt amazing."
She and nine other participants spent five days at the Military Academy at West Point, learning with cadets about leadership and effective communication.
"Basically, the program was to send us to West Point to learn how to be a better leader from these kids who decided they wanted to join West Point Military Academy," Perez said.
"A lot of them are still leaders very strongly in their program and seeing how their leadership styles have changed throughout the years."
The participants are all members of their campus's Student-to-Student or S2S programs. It's a partnership to pair current students with new students to welcome them to their schools.
Jayla Hayes is a student at Crossroads High School in Copperas Cove. She also participated in the program.
"I appreciated the opportunity and I'm really glad I'm going to be able to help more students with S2S," Hayes said.
Her school is just starting their S2S program, and she said this was a great opportunity for her to learn how to get it up and running.
"I was told about S2S about a month before I went to New York so I wasn't familiar with any of it," Hayes said.
"Just going down there was like a clean slate and now I have everything I need to know about it and how to make the students feel comfortable. That's my goal."
The girls said they learned a lot during their time in New York and made some really great friends. They also were taught about challenges they might face in life and ways to approach them.
"In our sociology and psychology class we took with them, they had to look back at when they were our age and the things they did then and hearing some of them say they were scared of some of the same things we were scared of, it kind of was like well I'm not alone and not the only person who has been through this," Perez said.
The girls have been back home for just a few days and say they've already put a lot of what they've learned to use already.
