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Leadership comes in all different forms, and in kids, leadership helps to build essential life skills like confidence, problem-solving, and empathy. At Betz Elementary, anyone can be a leader, and fifth grade students are encouraged to step out of their comfort zone and embrace leadership through Generation Alive.

Per their website, Generation Alive (GA) is “a nonprofit organization in Spokane, Wash., that is activating youth to lead with compassion.” Betz has been partnering with GA since 2023, and it is becoming a routine part of the fall semester. Any interested fifth graders complete an application process, including a form and a short essay on why they want to be part of the program. Once they have parental consent to participate, GA advisor and Betz fifth grade teacher, Nicole Williams, accepts them for the Action Team on a first-come, first-serve basis.

“This year was really great because they’ve seen this, and they’ve gotten to participate,” Williams said. “They were really excited, and they came in with ideas already for the skits for the assembly, game show ideas they wanted to do, and how they could do announcements differently.”

The 2025 Betz Action Team had 22 students, and they began weekly meetings in late September to map out their fall assembly and December food-packing event. This group of students learned about community needs, the meaning of compassion, how to inspire their peers to serve the community with them, how to fundraise and advocate for causes they care about, and ultimately how to lead their Generation Alive community service project.

This year’s group of students even created a rap song, complete with lyrics highlighting food insecurity, leading with compassion, and leadership. Click here to view the video.

“It surprised me how well they did with it because they were really like, we decided to throw together this rap,” Williams said. “When you listen to it, they had all the food insecurity things, all the strong messaging that needs to come with Generation Alive, and so then you’re like, wow. This is something they're truly interested in because you can tell they put all their energy into it.”

Students participating in Generation Alive also learned about their leadership style, including their personality types and preferred working style. GA breaks it down into four easily digestible groups: lions, bumble bees, otters, and golden retrievers. Students learned more about themselves, how they operate, and their strengths.

“It’s really fun when they start using the language,” Williams said. “They know who they are, and ‘I’m going to go find an otter because an otter is going to help me have these skills.’

So, when you’re building your team, you want to have all those personality leadership traits, because if you’re all lions, are you going to get something done?” Williams continued. “The kids grab on to this, the student-friendly terminology.”

Williams saw the growth throughout her class, and she saw peer understanding and acceptance flourish. One fifth grader in particular who made big strides with Generation Alive is Calen Angeles. Oftentimes viewed as more playful and goofy by his peers, Calen learned more about his own personality and leadership style through GA. Over the course of the fall, he blossomed into an unexpected but powerful leader.

“Seeing him go from someone that I think a lot of students view as just silly to like, oh, he’s very serious, he has a great work ethic,” Williams said. “Just kind of changing the perspective of his peers toward him was huge…In this arena, they realized he has a valuable skillset, and they asked, ‘Can he be at my table?! He knows what’s going on!’”

Calen’s leadership was especially important during the GA food-packing event. He is organized and has an attention to detail that is unmatched. Where some of his classmates struggled to remember the table setup, he was able to replicate it with ease.

“He looked at the display table when we were setting up, and he set up his table no problem,” Williams recounted. “That’s how he processes. [Students] were like, wait, I’m missing this? And he was like, yeah, you’re missing the green scoop. You’re missing the red scoop. He could just look at their table and know.”

“I feel so much like a leader and everything, for my group,” Calen said. “Packing up the food and everything, it was just the best.”

This year, Betz raised $2,008.83 during a six-week coin drive, providing over 8,000 meals for the community. On Dec. 4, the GA leadership team led Betz students through the food packing event, measuring and packing apple and cinnamon sugar oatmeal for the local food bank.

“The community service project is invaluable,” Williams said. “I think the whole school, raising [money] to pack the food and seeing the Cheney food bank here to get the food, knew they were helping to feed our community. That was really special to them. Both components are just really huge, so I cannot promote the program enough.

…When students are passionate about something, it’s amazing the product they produce.”

 

Girls wrestling is having a major moment. It is the fastest growing sport among high school girls in the country, with participation more than quadrupling since the 2017-18 school year. Cheney High School senior Jalisca Holmgren has experienced that growth first-hand. She was the only girl to compete during her freshman season in 2022-23, and today, the Blackhawks have 30 student-athletes as part of the girls wrestling program. 

“I started recruiting,” Holmgren recounted. “Mostly talking to my friends and people that I thought looked tough.”

Holmgren knows a thing or two about toughness, and it is clear that both her mental and physical toughness have grown through her relationship with wrestling. The Cheney native only began wrestling in eighth grade, and in her first year on the mat, she did not win a single match. Undeterred, Holmgren signed up to wrestle her freshman year at CHS. When it came time to report to the mat, she was the only girl to show up. 

“Every day I would go home and be like, man, I don’t know if I can do this anymore because it’s just the most brutal sport,” Holmgren said. “I knew I’d just get beat up a lot. But I’m so grateful that I took that step to be in the place where I am now.”

Now, she’s a three-time state competitor with an undefeated record to start her senior season, a far cry from where she was just four years ago. However, her growth did not come without resilience and countless hours on the mat, wrestling most often against boys. 

“I think even the basics were new to her,” said Head Coach Jeremy McGee. “She’s developed mentally and physically a lot over the last couple of years to be able to wrestle at a different level, and it all didn’t happen at once. Every match, every week, every season, every year, she got better and she got stronger.”

Once official competitions started her freshman year and she had an opportunity to wrestle against other girls, Holmgren gained an entirely new perspective. She soon realized wrestling could be something she really excelled at.

“I think [the turning point was] when competitions started,” she said. “I didn’t know what that would look like at all; I didn’t even know if there would be girls that I could compete with. Once I started competing and there were girls, I realized like, oh, I’m kind of good at this. It’s hard to compare yourself to a guy and know where you stand when you’re wrestling them, but once I started competing with girls I felt like I got a sense of accomplishment. I was like, I can make big things happen for myself and this sport. That made practice easier because I knew, in the back of my mind, practicing with only boys was making me mentally stronger than the girls I was competing against.”

From Holmgren’s perspective, without the support of McGee and the CHS boys’ wrestling coaching staff, she may not have made it through her freshman season as the lone girls wrestler.

“I thought going in, since there weren’t any other girls that they didn’t really like girls’ wrestling at Cheney, but when I came in, it was the exact opposite,” Holmgren said. “Every single coach came and talked to me, asked me a bunch of questions, and just made me feel so welcome.”

“It was hard and scary for me, but it was just amazing how the boys team just embraced her,” said M’Linda Holmgren, Jalisca’s mother. “If you look at the pictures from that first year, she’s just one of them. They would cheer her on.”  

Coach McGee provided the support Holmgren needed, guiding her through every move and encouraging her. His daughter Paige was in eighth grade during Holmgren’s freshman season, and once Paige’s own season ended, she joined Holmgren in practice. Her presence gave Holmgren a companion: someone to practice with, someone to warm up with, someone to travel with. It made a big difference during her first high school season. 

“I think that really helped, just having like, one other person, one other girl that could be with me,” Holmgren recalled. “It was really nice.”

Today, Holmgren has 29 other girls joining her on the mat in practice and matches. Cheney’s astronomical program growth aligns with trends across the Greater Spokane League where the majority of schools will field complete girls wrestling teams this season. As a result, GSL girls wrestling will have a dual meet schedule for the first time ever. 

“Looking back every year, I just wanted that to be me, watching the boys duals,” Holmgren said. “I’m so excited for this year. We’ve just got a team full of hammers. We’re going to have a really good year, try to be GSL champs, and just dominate our way through.”

And dominate they have. The Blackhawks are undefeated this season so far, including a commanding victory at the Second Annual Tie Dyes & Takedowns tournament on December 13. Cheney took first place with a total of 238.5 points and four first-place finishers, including Holmgren, Tessy Almond, Jennifer Tian, and Skylar Buckner. The Blackhawks were nearly 50 points ahead of the next closest team, with Post Falls coming in second  with 192.5 total points. Simply put, the future is bright for CHS girls wrestling.

“It’s been super awesome,” McGee said. “To grow a staff around me, to have coaches that are experienced, that are excited to build a girls’ team, and to coach them, has been great. And the girls have been amazing back to us. So, that’s really helped form a bond, but also, an expectation of what’s to come at Cheney.”

Check out the Cheney girls wrestling schedule by clicking here, or catch them in their next home match against Lewis and Clark on Jan. 14 at 6 p.m. at Cheney High School.

 

The December Community Connections Newsletter is now available. Check out this month's edition for more information on emergency make-up days, standards-based grading, community service projects, and a feature story on Cheney High School's girls' wrestling program!

Click here or click the photo below to read more!

 

 

Sunset Park Mural Photo Gallery

Shawn Bro, the Parks Maintenance Coordinator for Airway Heights Parks and Recreation, has been working to beautify the area’s parks and buildings since he was hired in 2019. The beigy-brown exterior of the Airway Heights Parks and Recreation maintenance office at Sunset Park was a bit of an eyesore, and Bro began brainstorming ways to make it more inviting.

“I was planning on painting the building, and I was standing there looking at it, and I thought, well, it’s a giant billboard,” Bro said. “To try to keep vandalization down and make things look better, I thought, well maybe we could try to put some art on the side of it.”

Bro reached out to Cheney High School art teacher Becki Dempsey to pitch the idea of a mural; he had a previous connection with Dempsey as she taught both of his children in her art classes.

“At first I was like, well, I’ll take it to the team because I just have never done a mural,” Dempsey recalled. “So, I took it to PLC, and then Katherine [Potter], and Sherry [Syrie] and Hannah [Brown] were all very receptive, like, let’s do this.”

All the secondary art teachers across the district are part of the art Professional Learning Community (PLC), with Potter representing Westwood Middle School, Syrie representing Cheney Middle School, and Dempsey and Brown at CHS. The team spearheaded the project, with planning beginning in the spring of 2025. 

“We had to pause it because of summer break,” Syrie said. “We were still getting it organized and buying paint, and then this fall we ran the contest with all the secondary schools.”

Bro set the parameters and expectations of the mural to guide the competition. It needed to be colorful, tie in aviation, green spaces, the water tower, and of course, a sunset. “I just sat there and thought about all these things that could possibly represent what Airway Heights is,” Bro said.”

The district art PLC team introduced the competition to their students last spring, but without dedicated classroom time to work on the project, there was not a lot of follow through or interest from students. 

“So we’re like, we need to give them time to work on it,” Potter said. “And that worked a lot better. We gave it to all of our students, but not all of them wanted to continue to really polish the piece and turn it in for the competition. I would say we had over 100 that did, and they took it home and got their parents to sign off on it, then brought it back and submitted it for the competition.”

In addition to Bro’s parameters, the art PLC team also had to consider if the submissions could be recreated on a larger scale.

“We were like, can we actually paint this or is it too highly detailed or too complicated?” Potter said. “Some things were off topic, so we screened those out. We looked through them and sent on what we thought were 15 really good options.”

The 15 contenders were sent on to Bro and his department for the final decision on the artwork. The selection? A uniquely colorful design from CMS eighth grader Mira Perret. The district art PLC team agreed that although there were several spectacular submissions, Perret incorporated all of Bro’s parameters.

“I feel like hers was the only one that really covered everything that Shawn wanted,” Brown said. “The sunset, the water tower, the airplanes, the nature. She was able to fit all of that because of the way she did the design.”

“Her design was remarkable; it stood out,” Potter concluded. 

Perret, who is a second-year art student in Syrie’s class, says she has always been drawn to murals, so when the opportunity to create her own mural presented itself, she was excited to enter.

“I grew up in Moscow, Idaho, which is a small college town, and because of that there were a lot of murals in the area, and they’ve always drawn my attention,” Perret said. “Not only do they convey a message or meaning about the place they’re located, but it can really brighten up areas and spark interest for other people that wouldn’t necessarily go out of their way to see art daily. So when I heard about the Sunset mural contest, I thought it would be fun to enter and possibly get a chance to put my ideas on a wall to impact people even in a small way.”

Once the design was selected, the planning began. Since this was the first mural design and application for the entire district art PLC team, it was a learning experience. Dempsey reached out to former student and Seattle muralist, Kendra Wells, for some advice.

“I texted her and asked some questions, you know, what do I need to do?” Dempsey said. “How do I get started? And she really helped out and sent me a long email of things to think about.”

Things like temperature, weather, the building texture, and surface materials. All of these elements have an impact on a mural. The district PLC team prepped the site during the district-wide Professional Learning Day on Oct. 10, painting the letters so it was ready to go for student volunteers to paint the design. Then, on a blustery Saturday a week later, they got to work.

“It was probably 34 degrees that first day with the wind chill,” Syrie said. “The metal building was freezing, and then the paint was freezing, and so everything started gelling like jam on bread…We made it work and threw on a second layer when it was warmer later in the day.”

Each teacher credits another for their work on the mural, from Potter’s preparation grid work to Syrie’s freehand painting of some of the curves.

“It took all of our eyes and areas of expertise to try to get it ready for the kids, then try to keep the kids on track as they were haphazardly doing all the things they do,” Syrie said with a laugh.

“Every single person in that PLC did their part for sure, just helping each other, talking it through,” Dempsey added. “Our team has always been a pretty strong team.”

Nearly 20 students participated in painting the mural, coming in shifts throughout the day on Oct. 18. They assisted with various tasks, and from Potter’s perspective, they were incredibly selfless. 

“All the kids were so open-minded and would just be like, ‘I’m here to help. What do you need me to do?’” Potter said. “Even if it was a small thing like touching up edges with brown paint, you know, there was never like, ‘I want to do something different!’ They were just really, really giving of themselves to the project.”

“There was an element of, it’s going to be here for decades, potentially, so this is important, and we need to help each other out, hold ladders, endure the elements because this is important,” Syrie added. “Slow down and have fun. Hannah brought music and Katherine and Becki brought food and hot cocoa. So, of course, there’s that kid element where it’s festive. We want it to be enjoyable so we get help again in the future potentially, just so they have a great experience with this thing that they did that was really special.”

With so many people involved with the execution of the project, Perret learned a lot about working together with her peers and shared experiences. 

“I learned a lot about collaboration,” she said. “I didn’t get to paint the whole thing myself, and that part was actually really hard for me. I don’t feel like it’s mine anymore. But, this is also exciting since it is supposed to represent the community. It is made by a lot of people for a lot of people, not just me. It’s a community project.”

The hours spent creating, planning, preparation, and execution resulted in a beautiful addition to Sunset Park, encompassing all that is Airway Heights. A real community effort, for a special community mural. 

“I love it,” Bro said. “It does everything that I thought it would, and it stands out.”

 

Click here or click the image to read the November Community Connections newsletter!