A look at the 2015 nominees for the Pete Swensson Outstanding Community Youth Award.
The award is given to a Langley secondary student in recognition of their athletic, scholastic and community efforts.
Shannon Walker envisions being an RCMP officer one day.
“It is the definition of someone who wants to help others,” said the Grade 12 Langley Secondary student.
“I am always willing to help people, I usually think of others before I think of myself.”
Walker is the CEO of her school’s leadership team, is the student representative on the LSS community roundtable and the school planning council, as well as this year’s grad president.
She is a peer counsellor and organizes intramurals and volunteers with score keeping through her PE leadership class. Walker was a founding organizer of Langley’s World Food Day and she travelled to Belize last year to help a rural school.
She does all this, while also playing field and box lacrosse , winning the a Workhorse Award in community lacrosse and being on the only female on her school’s lacrosse team which won a silver medal at the tier 2 provincial championships.
She works at an after school job, maintaining a B+/A average in her course work.
Walker says she wants to make school a place students want to be.
“Making other people want to come to school, keeping people involved, making sure everyone is happy to be at school rather than it being a place where they don’t want to go, rather make it a place where everyone wants to be,” she explained.
Walker, who hopes to attend SFU next year, has already gotten a jump on her post-secondary studies as part of the Kwantlen Polytechnic University Xcel program, which allows high school students to take one university course per semester.