More than 300 students from 21 schools, including the Kent School District, participated in the 27th annual Game of Life Conference last week at Kent Commons.
Students from nine schools attended Dec. 15 and 12 schools took part on Dec. 16 in the conference, which is sponsored by the Kent Police Department and Kent Police Youth Board.
Stacy Judd, Kent Police community education coordinator, said the purpose of the conference is two-fold.
“We would like to influence individual behavior, so if as a student they are faced with a choice – whether it be nutrition, exercise or saying no to marijuana or alcohol – we want to influence their individual behavior,” Judd said. “We also want to have them take information that they learn today back into their school.”
Attendees are tasked with coming up with ways they can apply what they learned at the conference at their schools.
“They will start brain storming a project to do at their schools sometime in the spring,” Judd said. “We don’t want it to just be a one-day thing and it’s done.”
Students on the Kent Police Youth Board selected the topics for the conference, which this year included safe driving, social media, respect, leadership, drug and alcohol abuse, and suicide prevention.
Nellie Escandon and Roshni Sabhaya, freshman at Kentridge High School, got involved with the Youth Board after attending the Game of Life in previous years.
“We all kind of had a picture of what it would look like because we were all here last year so we had something to reference off of,” Escandon said of planning this year’s conference. “We went to the meetings and everything and talked about what we thought went well last year and what we thought we could change and based it off what we want to do.”
Planning the conference was challenging but rewarding, Sabhaya said.
“I think that is it really stressful when you are planning it but it is also fun because you get to interact with all these new people you’ve never met.”
“We put so much time and work into, like hours, and we were all here pretty much here last night (Dec. 14) setting up,” Escandon added, “But when you come and see people smile and you see people taking information from the key note speakers, it feels good that you actually helped.”
Escandon said she appreciated the work Judd put into organizing the conference.
“She works very hard at this she spends so many hours here and so many hours planning it,” Escandon said.
Leaders in the making
Escandon said she hopes students who attended the conference will become leaders in their schools.
“You don’t have to be the popular one in your group to be the leader,” she said. “You don’t have to be outgoing either. You can be a silent leader in that you can help in small ways and not big ways.”
Emilio Torres and Cameron Stewart, sophomores at Kentridge High School, were invited by a school counselor to attend the conference on Dec. 15.
Torres said he appreciated how knowledgeable the presenters were.
“I learned a lot facts I didn’t know,” he said.
Stewart said one of her favorite parts of the workshop was a lecture on healthy living.
“He (the speaker) used the analogy of us being cars and that you only get one car and how would you take care of that car to further your life or further the car’s life,” she said.
The lectures made Stewart more aware of making healthy choices, she said.
“I am going to think about instead of ordering a cheeseburger maybe a salad because of the lifespan, how many years it takes off you,” she said. “Just those small choices can affect you so much in the long term.”
Stewart said she looks forward to sharing what she learned at the conference with her classmates.
“I talk to a lot of people,” she said. “That is why I was one of the chosen ones (to attend the conference). Now that I have the knowledge I have the ability to share it so without this I would have had this knowledge.”
Torres said he hopes to impart the importance of being healthier on other students at Kentridge.
“The workshop we had about healthy eating and taking care of yourself, he (the speaker) said, ‘It is really simple. All you need to do is exercise, don’t eat sugar and don’t eat a lot of fat and just do those three little simple things,’ ” Torres said.
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