The Batten Leadership Fellows Program at Norfolk Academy encourages highly engaged students to work to understand hard problems and contribute to solving them.
Fellows involve themselves with one of five cohorts: Chesapeake Bay; Engineering, Design, and Innovation; Global Affairs; Global Health; and Literacy. All of these groups traditionally explore complex issues, then go into the community to provide help, often going to different states and countries.
This past year has been different for the program, because travel has been impossible and social distancing has been required. But it has nonetheless demonstrated how its students can dig deep to provide for both the Norfolk Academy community and those beyond the campus. For example, Global Health Fellows produced a series that informed about various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including its impact, vaccination efforts, and even media coverage.
Students enter the Fellows program in 10th grade. New Fellows for the 2021-22 school year, who will graduate in 2024, were recently selected. Mr. Sean Wetmore, co-director of the program, along with Mrs. Price Hall, said 74 excellent students applied.
“We are incredibly thankful for every student who applied and were blown away by the thoughtfulness and high quality of this group," Mr. Wetmore said. “Our newest Fellows are a highly accomplished and diverse group of students who seem ready to apply lessons they will learn through our program to solve problems facing our community. We are very excited to get to know and work with this group!"
To learn about program activities, please visit their student-run Instagram page.
2021 Batten Leadership Program Fellows
Chesapeake Bay Fellows
Lee Acra
Ethan Eveleigh
Mills Everett
Sydney Joynt
Toye Lawani
Marin Soderberg
Sam Tignor
EDI Fellows
Sam Bibeau
Julian Burke
William Crouch
Ann Gray Golpira
Zoë Jones
Owen Yeung
Literacy Fellows
Bree Falkner
Charles Hope
Isabella Leon
Emerson Marling
Chloe Pausch
Lily Stockwell
Global Health Fellows
Joe Bakkar
Shelby Beverly
Van Deans
Sophie Pollio
Varish Sappati
Gretchen Scott
Global Affairs Fellows
Lizzie Adams
Brooke Bettencourt
Kaiya Burnell-Grant
Srivarun Hathwar
McKenna Panko
Areen Syed