Local student selected to attend student leadership conference

Marguerite (“Maggie”) Jackson, a student at Santa Paula High School, has been selected to attend the 2009 Congressional Student Leadership Conference (CSLC) on Medicine & Healthcare, sponsored by LeadAmerica. She will join other exceptional high school students with records of academic achievement and extracurricular or community involvement who are invited to participate. The conference will take place on the campus of University of California at Berkeley in San Francisco. The CSLC on Medicine & Healthcare is a 10-day leadership program in which students take on the roles of healthcare professionals and learn to manage a patient’s case, making healthcare decisions based on new medical facts and circumstances presented each day. In a hands-on learning environment, Maggie and fellow students will work with cutting-edge robotic simulators that look and respond like real patients, or participate in a patient simulation where medical actors play the roles of patients with unidentified illnesses.The CSLC on Medicine & Healthcare is designed in cooperation with Georgetown University School of Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the Chicago Medical School at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. These leading medical schools give CSLC students access to their facilities and laboratories and insights into the challenges facing the medical profession.“Today, more than ever, youth leadership education is essential,” says Chris M. Salamone, Esq., founder and executive director of LeadAmerica. “Leadership can make important differences in the lives of teenagers – in their academic and personal performance, in their acceptance to the college of their choice, and in their level of focus, passion and purpose. It is the key to what they do with their lives and how well they do it. I cannot think of a time in history during which leadership was more imperative.”