Episode Details

Superintendent Godfrey:
Hello and welcome to the Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. Today we meet two Jordan School District seniors who say their lives were changed by participating in the Governor's Honors Academy at Southern Utah University. The Academy was created to provide Utah high school students an opportunity to learn, lead, and interact with some of the most successful leaders in business technology, humanities, education, and more. Megan Dean, a senior at Copper Hills High and Addison Smith, a senior at Bingham High. We're both selected to attend the prestigious Academy, find out how it changed their lives, giving them confidence and a head start on the road to higher education with a four year scholarship. First, we visit Megan in her Peer Tutoring Class at Copper Hills High, where she is doing something. She loves working to support students who have special needs.

Megan:
Let's read this again, "Wear sunscreen when you're out in the sun." Wipe it on your skin and get that protection from burning, right.

Superintendent Godfrey:
We're here with Megan in her natural habitat, Copper Hills High School. Megan, you are the president of CH Pals. Tell us a little bit about that.

Megan:
So CH Pals is the club where we take the students with severe disabilities and we involve them into mainstream student life. We hold socials for them. We take them to a bunch of school events like football games, basketball games.

Superintendent Godfrey:
Okay. Tell me a little bit about the Governor's Honors Academy. I think a lot of people haven't heard of it, and what's involved.

Megan:
So, this is a program that teaches high school students, their junior and senior year about leadership, communication, goals, and just about our futures. It was a really, really awesome week. We took classes from multiple people. CEOs, multimillionaires, people who taught us about leadership and how to be successful and goals and visions.

Superintendent Godfrey:
Megan, who were some of the people that you heard from that really stood out, that were particularly impactful for you?

Megan:
Some of my favorite speakers were Stuart Jones, Derek Anderson, David Litchford. I liked the Morley brothers too. There were a lot of other speakers, but I think those are the people that stuck out to me the most.

(03:08):
What are some of the things that you learned from them?

(03:11):
Stuart Jones talks about "What's your, why?" Which is, basically, what's your purpose in doing what you're doing? Another one of my favorite speakers was Stewart Jones and he also talked about "What's your why, what's your purpose?" And one of the activities he did was one of the most impactful things at GHA for me. It was an activity called Standing Up for your Brothers and Sisters of GHA. He gave us a paper with lists of different struggles that we go through and we filled them out and we did it anonymously. And then we crumbled up the paper and put it in a bag and we got somebody else's. And so he would, one at a time, read the struggles and then we would stand up for this person. And it was a good reminder, just that like nobody was never alone in the struggles we went through and that we were there for each other and it was one of my