Private Schools Star Students 2018

School can be a chore for kids. But it suddenly becomes a rehearsal for real life when students have the opportunity to explore their unique passions. Whether it’s mashing together dance and biology, whipping up an allergy cookbook or just having fun with Legos, these bright students are performing their own acts. Grab some popcorn, sit back and let their talents dazzle you.

Cydnee Livingston

St. Vincent-St. Mary High School Senior

When Ruby Kofsky first met Cydnee Livingston, she was unsure of herself and not comfortable speaking in front of groups. Then the 17-year-old Akron resident joined Kofsky’s Model United Nations academic team.

Now, Livingston commands rooms of 300 to 400 people at competitions and has won two gavel awards, the highest individual award.

“Most people can’t win an argument against you if you have a passion for it,” Kofsky, the director of the Model U.N. team, says to Livingston.

What changed? Since Livingston joined the team in 2015, she has dedicated herself to the weekly family-style dinner Sunday work sessions, competitions throughout the country and a summer camp with the Best Delegate organization in Washington, D.C. Kofsky helped Livingston get organized so she could write strong position papers that propose solutions to global issues and gain confidence in her stance by researching both sides of the issue.

“I just tell them their gifts,” says Kofsky. “Sometimes they don’t see them for a while.”

Livingston has become passionate about world issues and in a recent competition, addressed female genital mutilation. She admits researching such atrocities astonishes her, but it also inspires her to help.

“The first thing is more of a shock,” Livingston says. “Then it’s kind of like, OK, well, what can we do to make it better?”

To get a real-world perspective on such topics, Kofsky encourages students to get involved with local causes. Livingston coordinated a human trafficking awareness event at St. Vincent-St. Mary and spoke in front of Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine’s drug commission board to discuss how the drug epidemic affects teens.

Livingston wants to use her global perspective to study business or political science and propel her knack at winning arguments into a career as a lawyer.

“I didn’t know a lot of people from different backgrounds or the international community,” Livingston says. “Opening my eyes up to different things in the world made me a stronger person. It helped me find hope that the world can be a better place.”

Catherine Walker

Old Trail School Eighth-Grader

Food has been a real challenge for Catherine Walker’s family. The 13-year-old is allergic to dairy, eggs, peanuts and tree nuts, and her brother also has allergies. So cooking together became a natural solution.

“We’ve been cooking at home my whole life,” she says. “We never go to restaurants.”

Once her mom trusted her to use the stove, Catherine blossomed as a cook, experimenting with techniques she discovered on cooking shows and developing her own recipes. One of those recipes, Chili Shrimp and Rice with Mango Jalapeno Sauce, was selected as a finalist in Michelle Obama’s Healthy Lunchtime Challenge in 2016. “You have the spicy shrimp and the cool mango sauce and this wonderful rice that goes with it and sort of blends all the flavors of tropical, spicy and sweet together,” she describes.

That original recipe will appear along with 75 others in Catherine’s own cookbook, “Cook It Up: Delicious Recipes for Healthy Cooking” that will be published later this year. All the recipes are dairy, egg, peanut and tree nut free. Heinen’s has already pledged to sell it in its stores.

Laurie Arnold, Catherine’s adviser and Spanish teacher at Old Trail, sees Catherine’s potential as unlimited. “She’s so invested in her interest, and she really delves in,” she says. “Plus she’s got all the skills, creativity and intelligence to back it up.”

Catherine works with Chef Jay in the Old Trail kitchen to develop lunch options, like her favorite, cauliflower, that accommodate allergies. She hopes one day to be an advocate for those with allergies.

Whatever her future holds, Catherine knows she’ll always be cooking. “I like taking fresh ingredients and turning [them] into something that’s really beautiful,” she says. “I’m an artist, too, so presenting food on a plate is wonderful.”

Julia Lyda

Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy Junior

When you think of high school yearbooks, you picture candid shots of classmates in the cafeteria, on the football field or singing in the choir that add movement around the pages of stiff, posed photos that capture forever the dated hairstyles of the moment. But 16-year-old Julia Lyda sees a yearbook as more than photos. “It portrays the school, how we feel during the year, what we feel is necessary for life,” she says. Compiling a yearbook can also be rehearsal for a career.

Lyda was one of the first freshmen allowed to take Marian Stofsick’s Graphic Design 1 course, previously reserved for juniors and seniors.

“By opening it up Julia’s freshman year, she’s been able to major in the subject,” says Stofsick, an educator and adviser with CVCA for the past 11 years. The succession of focused work sparked a passion in Lyda for graphic design that led her to help Stofsick complete last year’s yearbook, even though she wasn’t officially in the class for it.

“ She has major drive, and she takes direction really, really well,” Stofsick says of Lyda, “which is why she’s managing editor of yearbook this year.”

As a class at CVCA, yearbook serves as a kind of capstone for the other multimedia courses that Lyda progressed through. “It helped me apply what I learned through the graphic design and photo illustration [classes],” she says. “It’s a class, but it’s more like life application.”

Because of this experience, Lyda plans to attend Kent State University — Stofsick’s alma mater — and focus on graphic design so she can one day bring this passion into her working life. “It helped me to get out of my comfort zone,” she says. “I’ve always had an artistic background, but this was where I found my place, working with computers and graphic design.”

Lexi Shoemaker

Western Reserve Academy Senior

Lexi Shoemaker is a dancer who loves biology. To most, the disparate disciplines don’t have much in common. But leave it to the determined 18-year-old to find a way to link them.

The Lake Forest, Illinois, native wanted to do a Compass program, which allows students to apply their interests through a real-world project. She sat down with Ralf Borrmann, the Compass coordinator, to research how to combine her passion for the freedom of modern dance and her love of the 3-D components of biology. They became inspired by Science magazine’s Dance Your Ph.D. contest, which challenges researchers to describe what they study with dance.

They came up with a project wherein Shoemaker choregraphs three or four dances that visualize mitosis, the process of cellular division, and teaches them to biology students before exams. Her project concludes with a performance of those dances and a piece that puts it all together in May.

Emily Barth, director of dance and associate dean of students, has been advising Shoemaker — although the self-starter hasn’t needed much help. Barth explains some students learn by doing, so combining dance with biology could expand students’ learning experiences.

“She’s creating an opportunity for our students as well as our teachers to see just how dance can impact the classroom,” she says.

Forging a new path comes with roadblocks. Early on, Shoemaker was stuck on how an audience could see the 2-D concept of mitosis onstage with choreography that has students dancing in a circle, like a cell membrane, around two students standing back to back to show the cell division. Borrmann helped her develop a plan where an aerial camera livestreams the dance onto a screen for a bird’s-eye view.

“You have to reach out to people,” Shoemaker says. “You have to learn that you’re not always going to have the answer immediately.”

Shoemaker applies her ambition to her other roles on campus as a prefect, who oversees dorm residents, and a Morgan Leader, who is a bridge between the faculty and administration, and students.

“She’s an extremely powerful dancer onstage but also has a powerful presence everywhere else,” Barth says.

Will Bopp

St. Paul School Seventh-Grader

What do you get when you cross Lego-loving youngsters and STEM-driven competition? Robots!

That’s the focus of the First Lego League Robotics team at St. Paul School that Kevin Fonner helped organize seven years ago. “It’s like scouting for engineers, in the sense that it teaches you all these life skills that you can take to solving a problem,” he says.

League teams compete in a three-part challenge. First, they design, build and program an autonomous robot with Lego Mindstorms that participates in a tabletop playing field against other teams’ robots. Next, they approach a real-world problem, like natural disaster responses or dealing with trash, to find an innovative, viable solution. The third component, core values, weaves lessons of sportsmanship, professionalism and cooperation into the entire experience.

Will Bopp joined the team in first grade because he really loved the Legos he received as gifts at Christmas and birthdays. Now 12, Will excels not only at building things, but also at gracious professionalism, one of the core values the program instills in participants.

“[It’s] being nice and kind [and] helping other teams out,” he says. “And your team’s always sticking together.”

Even at league competitions, which Will describes as “energetic and friendly,” those core values allow these aspiring engineers and leaders to learn from each other and build valuable life skills. “In the future when we have jobs, if we need to work as a team, this will help us,” Will says.

“Will’s core values are outstanding in terms of working with his developing teammates,” Fonner says. A project software engineer with Rockwell Automation by day, Fonner volunteers to coach and mentor the league at St. Paul’s, where his son is also a student. “When [kids] sit down to solve a problem, they might not realize how many tools and ways there are to work together.”

Though still young, Will knows the league will shape his future career. “I want to be an engineer or something to do with math because I’m good at math,” he says.

In the meantime, he continues to build both robots and leadership skills with his Legos.

Alex Mammone

Cornerstone Community School Third-Grader

Last April, Alex Mammone got to ride his BMX bike in a place he’d never expected — his school.

As part of Cornerstone Community School’s Fantastic Friday program, which offers kids a hands-on workshop to explore an area of interest, the 9-year-old Hudson resident participated in — and taught other students — a program about his passion.

“It was really cool, because I got to share my talent with other kids,” says Alex, who has been a BMX rider since he was 4 and competed in eight championships through Akron BMX.

Kathy Brown, a parent volunteer at Cornerstone and a full-time volunteer at Akron BMX, led the BMX program over two sessions. For one, the students used a fleet of rental bikes and helmets from Akron BMX to learn balance and maneuverability, and go over ramps set up in the parking lot. For another session, rain clouds rolled in, so the students watched BMX videos indoors, and Alex gave pointers on BMX racing while showing off his colorful racing uniform, bike and gear.

“Alex is very pleasant to be around,” Brown says. “He articulates himself pretty well.”

The sessions weren’t all review for Alex. He got to learn tricks, such as how to manual, which is riding on the back tire with the front tire in the air to pick up speed, from Brown’s 14-year-old BMX rider son, Mac. “Mac has been racing really long,” Alex says. “He taught me new things and more about how to jump.”

When he grows up, Alex hopes to be an X Games athlete or pro baseball player.

Letting students find out what they do and don’t like is what the Fantastic Friday programs are all about, says Brown.

“It gives kids an early introduction into what life is like outside of the classroom,” she says.