PAL


 Sponsor - Mrs. Calderaro 

PAL (Peer Assistance and Leadership) meets weekly in room 101 during: Monday A Lunch, Thursday A Lunch, and Friday A Lunch.


Applications are accepted in the spring and include a notebook, interviews and teacher recommendations. See Mrs. Calderaro in Room 101 for more information.

  PAL OFFICERS
From left to right: Andrew Ghansyam, Marissa Flores, Giselle Oviedo, Javier Guerra 

Class Information

Peer Assistance and Leadership (PALS) is an upper-level course, open to juniors and seniors who successfully complete an application process.PAL students mentors students at district elementary and middle schools, as well as OMEGA students.Additionally, students participate in community and campus activities, such as Unity Day, Red Ribbon Week,HUGS for Autism, Birthday in a Bag, and Color Your World.

   

Officers for 2015-2016

President:
Giselle Oviedo
Executive Vice President:
 Javier Guerra
OMEGA Coordinator:
 Jackie Rubio
Vice President of Campus Pride:
 Julia Lohse
Vice President of Campus Programs:
 Andrew Ghansyam
Vice President of Community Service:
Albert Nguyen
Vice President of Social Events:
 Marissa Flores
Vice President of Communications:
Holly Gonzales

According to the Workers' Assistance Program, Peer Assistance and Leadership began in Texas in 1980 as a "peer helping" program, combining "peer assistance" and "peer leadership" strategies originally developed in the late 1970's. The PAL program is an award-winning, Nationally Recognized Evidence-Based Prevention Program owned and operated by the non-profit organization, Workers' Assistance Program, Inc. (WAP). The mission of the PAL program is to enable young people to use their potential to make a difference in their lives, schools, and communities.

Over the last couple of decades, WAP has significantly enhanced and expanded these basic prevention strategies, evolving the PAL peer helping program from an informal, extra-curricular activity in a single school district, into a formally structured, curriculum-based program, adopted by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) as an accredited elective course.


The PAL (Peer Assistance and Leadership) program recognizes an innate capacity for social understanding, personal well-being, and community participation within every student. PAL nurtures and builds capacities to help youth increase resiliency and build protective factors to help them achieve school and social successes which lead to a productive life. This versatile course creates environments in which youth participate in productive pursuits with peers, using decision making, higher order thinking skills, and resiliency building. PAL students learn to adapt the power of peer pressure to influence others positively and, ultimately, they make a difference in the lives of others. Positive peer influence is utilized as a central strategy for addressing issues like bullying, low achievement, at-risk youth, drop-out prevention, substance abuse prevention, teen pregnancy, suicide, absenteeism, behavior problems, and other community issues.