Fifty students from Central Texas high schools will arrive at The University of Texas at Austin on July 18, to begin an intensive four-day leadership academy designed to give them the skills to address the needs of the next generation, including a growing Hispanic population that has become the largest and youngest minority group in the United States.
Subiendo: The Academy for Rising Leaders, July 18-21, is a new endeavor by the Center for Politics and Governance at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the Texas Exes and the university.
Throughout the course of their stay, students will have the opportunity to meet and hear from Texas’s most distinguished political and business leaders. Speakers include Gov. Rick Perry; Henry Cisneros, former San Antonio mayor; University of Texas System Chancellor Francisco G. Cigarroa; Sara Martinez Tucker, former under secretary at the U.S. Department of Education; Lee Yeakel, U.S. district judge for the Western District of Texas; and David G. Booth, founder of Dimensional Fund Advisors.
Activities include an etiquette dinner with high-profile community leaders, and a crisis management simulation where they will be divided into groups, given a realistic crisis scenario and asked to strategize solutions. They will also participate in a communications workshop, and have time to work on creating a policy to help solve a real-world problem in their communities.
On Wednesday, July 21, the students will travel to the Texas state Capitol where they will present the policies they have created, take questions from their fellow students and then vote on the policy as if they were members of the state legislature. At the end of the practice, journalists from the Capitol press corps will ask the students questions about their work in a press conference-style simulation.
The academy is funded by philanthropy and is free for participating students. For the summer 2010 academy, applications were open to Central Texas high school students, regardless of race or ethnicity, who had completed their junior year of high school by July 1. Students were asked to complete an application and essay on the challenges facing the state of Texas and to submit an application online. The academy’s goal is to expand the program in future years to include students from throughout Texas.
Note to editors/producers: Spanish-language speakers are available for interviews.
