When Sedona Red Rock High School junior Dayanna Landaverde gets done with school, she heads straight over to Uptown, where she works at a souvenir shop until 9 p.m.

That’s after getting up a little early for her Certified Nursing Assistant and Phlebotomy classes at Valley Academy for Career and Technology Education.

She’s involved with the Interact Club at the high school, and was nominated to be the school’s representative at the American Legion Auxiliary Girls State Leadership Camp.

Girls State

The camp is to help educate students on civics and government.

“For one week this summer,” the camp’s flyer states, “at the University of Arizona in Tucson, you become a citizen of a mythical state … Arizona Girls State. You live in a fictional City in a fictional County in the mythical State.

“You elect your leaders and write your own ordinances and resolutions, debate legislation and learn how the judicial process works.”

Landaverde said she’s excited to learn more about government and how it works.

“I was really shocked, because I was like, ‘why me?’” she said. “Then I was like, ‘I could get this opportunity to open myself and see more things.’”

Outside of work andschool, she plays softball, and in the other athletic seasons has played basketball and soccer.

She’s in the first year of the VACTE program and plans on going into the medical field after graduating, whether that be nursing or some other profession.

Two other students, junior Kahil Alexander and sophomore Emily Calogero, were chosen for two other leadership camps: The Boys State Leadership Camp and the Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership Camp, respectively.

Boys State

Alexander, who’s going to the Boys State Leadership Camp, said he’s looking forward to the weeklong event in June.

“In recent years, I started really educating myself about politics, always doing research,” he said. “And also this year [was the] first semester I did government [class].”

The Boys State camp is the same structure as the Girls’, with fictitious governments and municipalities.

While not in the Interact Club, like the other two nominees, he’s in the school’s Honors Society and has been enrolled in dual credit Yavapai College engineering courses.

Next year, he’ll be fully online at SRRHS and taking classes through Yavapai College’s Career and Technical Center in Chino Valley. He hopes to graduate high school with an associate degree from the community college.

His goal is to eventually earn a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from Northern Arizona University.

While not in class, he canbe found either working at Dominos in West Sedona or playing volleyball with one of his friends every Tuesday.

“We were interested in trying out a sport that we both wanted to do,” he said. “Because, in the beginning of freshman year, I did track, but I didn’t really like it. He’s a really big athletic dude. So we just were like, ‘OK, we both are interested in volleyball.’”

HOBY

The Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership Camp, or HOBY, is a little bit different than the other two; it involves mainly seminars at Arizona State University in Phoenix.

The three- to four-day event includes “dialogue and abilities-based workshops to develop awareness of their leadership strengths and an understanding of their leadership values,” according to the HOBY website.

Calogero said if they’re anything like the seminars she experienced at the Rotary Youth Leadership Awards Camp in January, she’ll like them.

“I just love that experience so much that … forRYLA, I applied to be a junior counselor,” she said.

“And the HOBY camp seemed to be very similar in nature.”The RYLA camp had a lot of focus on communication, public speaking and team work, and was based in Prescott over Martin Luther King Jr. Weekend.

Calogero is involved in the Interact Club and is studying for two Advanced Placement Exams in early May, AP US History and AP Seminar.

“It’s a researching class,” she said of AP Seminar. “There’s a lot of things that go into it, but you make arguments and you present them, so it’s presentation and it’s writing.”

She played on the Scorpion tennis team last year, but since it was discontinued, she’d continued with a few friends as a club activity.

She said the math classes are her favorite because it’s straightforward and organized. She said she doesn’t know yet what she wants to do after graduation, but is considering STEM fields like cybersecurity.