Lions Youth of the Year

Earlier this term saw school leaders, Fiona Dipasupil, Sam Ryan, Tanzin Myers and Georgia Matthews participate in the Lions Youth of the Year. This Lions project seeks to foster leadership skills for students approaching the end of their high school years. 

Traditionally, Rochester Secondary College captains and SRC president are invited to take part. The program allows students to gain further experience in leadership, personal improvement, sportsmanship, citizenship, community involvement and public speaking. Students have a chance to progress through club, zone, regional and district judging, culminating in state and national finals. 

At this year’s Rochester Lions group event, participating students were required to first respond to the impromptu questions “What are you most proud about yourself and why?” and “If a genie gave you three wishes what would they be?”. These interesting prompts resulted in our audience reflecting comfortably in their seats while our students swiftly addressed them in entertaining and very thoughtful ways. It was very clear at this stage that Rochester Secondary College has produced some very inspiring young leaders.

Following this section, our leaders then launched into their speeches. With Fiona speaking to the impact of social media on body image, Georgia highlighting mental health impacts after our COVID experiences, Sam bringing the issue of Campaspe Shire’s recent decisions on swimming facilities to our attention and Tanzin discussing the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. This diverse range of topics was handled expertly by our student leaders who had clearly prepared themselves so very well and spoke with passion and conviction.

The calibre of the prepared speeches and public speaking by our students was nothing short of outstanding. The judging team and audience spoke very highly of all students participating and were so impressed with each speech and how they conducted themselves throughout. The final points awarded for the competition were extremely close and the judging team had a tough task of deliberation to determine the award winners.

At the end of the evening, the Public Speaking award was won by Tanzin Myers and the overall Lions Youth of the Year award was won by Georgia Matthews. The judges and Lions group members all stressed how incredibly close the competition was and how impressed they were by each of the participants.

Georgia Matthews now has the opportunity to progress through to the next level of competition and Rochester Secondary wishes her all the best with this next stage.

 A big thank you to George Dimovski and Steve Warren for their encouragement and support with preparing our student leaders and to Melissa Gould for her ongoing support of this valuable program. Thank you also to Janet Park, Graham Willis and Jeanne Aitken for judging the event and to Mr Prigg for his continued service to this program and ongoing help provided to our student leaders.