At Carlsbad High School there are many clubs that encourage students to get involved. These clubs range from something as simple as Spanish club to more serious clubs such as Interact club. Encuentros club is a club on campus that hopes to promote leadership qualities within the latino community. Over the summer, members of the club will attend a week-long leadership camp that will encourage them to strive for greatness and be a leader. The mission of the club is very significant and it has promoted a great message for the latino population at schools across the county.

“Encuentros Leadership of San Diego county is a non-profit organization started by latino business men in the community with the goal of increasing the high school graduation rate, college attendance rate and college graduation rate for latino males,” ELD resource teacher Elisa Ayala said. “This is because they are statistically one of the lowest groups to actually complete high school and not only go to college, but actually complete it.”

The Encuentros Summer Leadership Academy is a very prestigious and exclusive program available to students in grades 9-11, so the men who were chosen to attend this camp were required to have a GPA of 3.0 and an appropriate transcript. This year the camp accepted five students from Carlsbad and five students from Sage Creek.

“This year the campus they are going to be able to stay at for the program is USD and during that week they will participate in a week long summer leadership, career and academic focused event,” Ayala said. “It is sort of like a camp because they stay on campus in a dorm and are put into teams. They stay there from Sunday till the following Saturday and their days are filled with leadership seminars from local community leaders, field trips to businesses, educational workshops, leadership skill workshops, and workshops to help with resume writings, interview skills, etc.”

After the week-long camp the students are more likely to feel more empowered to succeed in their future, and take away many skills to help them through their professional life.

“When they come back they will feel more prepared and more likely to be successful in high school so they can get into college, as well as being a successful college student,” Ayala said. “The skills they learn are considered soft skills, which are interaction with others, eye-contact, hand shakes, etc. All of these things will give a student a leg up in an interview or a net-working situation, so those skills they learn they will be able to utilize when they come back for their senior year in high school and college.”