By Cate Casparius ’19 & Bri Zeiberg ’19

Hallie Spear ’18 stepped off the bus in Washington, D.C. with bags in hand ready to swap the Staples High School hallways for the streets of D.C. The School for Ethics and Global Leadership, also known as SEGL, is designed to create a unique and innovative type of education for students nationwide. It is a program with selected students from across the country who exhibit “outstanding character, promise for leadership and scholastic ability,” as described on the SEGL website.

Spear is currently enrolled in the program and described it as a school that focuses on giving students great opportunities to become ethical global leaders  who  will  hopefully change the world.

Spear noted her goal of learning to be a leader while attending. “Right now, I have no idea how to be a global leader. I don’t know how to write public policy, negotiate with international diplomats, engage troops in combat or write a State of the Union address,” Spear said. “Besides this, there are an endless amount of ethical dilemmas in the world of being a global leader which I do not understand right now. I want to become a person who can be an ethical leader.”

The school offers a variety of courses and community service projects in order to give students the best experience possible. Since the school is located in D.C., it takes advantage of being able to bring students to important monuments and museums, such as the Islamic Center of D.C., the Newseum and the Holocaust Museum. All of these museums allow students to learn beyond what’s normally taught in the classroom.

In addition to the strong academic program, the school focuses on wellness skills. Students can do yoga, meditate, workout and learn more about who they are in order to destress after a long day. At the end of the semester, teachers give students the ability to use the information learned to teach other students these new skills. This allows students to take initiative and showcase what they have learned.

Greens Farms Academy, Michaela Cohen ’18 completed the program last spring. She participated in the program in order to surround herself with other like-minded students with a desire to learn more about becoming a global thinker. “For me, SEGL was the place where I became comfortable being myself. It’s a place where people care. That was new to me,” Cohen said. “As high schoolers we get so caught up in school work that at some point, being apathetic and uninterested just becomes easier. Not only is SEGL a place where people care about issues that don’t directly affect them, but it is also a place where people care about each other.”

Cohen also shared that one of her favorite parts of the program was being able to present her views on a topic of choice to leaders who were excited to hear what she had to say. Cohen’s topic discussed the issue of ISIS’s use of social media for recruitment.

“We wrote a forty page document with recommendations and presented these recommendations at the State Department, at the Department of Justice and at the Vice President’s Office,” Cohen said. “Every SEGL grad I have talked to never forgets the feeling of standing up in front of important people and telling them your ideas and having them truly listen.”

Not only does SEGL have a semester program, but they also have a summer program. The summer program takes 20 rising junior and senior students from all over the country. The main purpose of both SEGL programs is to push students to accomplish things they wouldn’t be able to achieve in a normal school setting while developing new leaders who can provide positive solutions to the world.