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Senior Spotlight 2026: Young leaders in community taking bold steps
- Jasz Garrett
- May 23
- 13 min read
Updated: May 25
JDHS, YDHS and homeschool students share their journeys to graduation day and where they’re going next
By Jasz Garrett, Mark Sabbatini and Ellie Ruel
For students coming from different types of high schools in Juneau, often the greatest success comes from learning in their own ways with the right support.
Those successes will also be celebrated in different ways. Yaaḵoosgé Daakahídi High School will hold its graduation for 34 seniors at the Dzantik’i Heeni gymnasium at noon on Sunday. Advisory teachers will recognize each graduate of the alternative high school at the ceremony.
Later that same day at 4 p.m., 280 seniors are set to walk at Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé in the George Houston gymnasium. That total includes students graduating from the district's homeschool program, HomeBRIDGE. Both graduation ceremonies will be livestreamed over Zoom by the Juneau School District. Tickets are required to attend the JDHS graduation in person.
The last day of school was on Wednesday. Here are lookbacks from three students — one each from JDHS, YDHS and a homeschool program — at their senior year and how it shaped them.
Mackenna Galvin, 17, Yaakoosgé Daakahídi High School
Mackenna Galvin, 17, transitioned to Yaaḵoosgé Daakahídi High School last fall from Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé.
“I've always been drawn to the smaller groups and it’s been harder for me to work with bigger groups,” she said. “Since the combining of JD it just got huge and overwhelming, and so I did a tour at Yaaḵoosgé, and I saw how welcoming it was and the benefits, so I immediately joined.”
Galvin described Yaaḵoosgé as “more of a community than a school.”
Shortly after starting at the new school, Galvin joined the student council. She volunteered at the food pantry and free student clothing store YDHS graduate Ira Anstine helped set up. Galvin continued Anstine’s volunteer work this school year, leading other students.
“I help with a lot around the school and I really just liked the idea of us having a food pantry,” she said. “I wanted to make sure it was all set up for our students. We have advisory and our teachers would tell us what benefits we have. Our student council is called ‘Grit,’ and so our teacher told us about it. I wanted my voice to be heard and I always have a bunch of ideas, so I just wanted to help out.”
Galvin said there’s breakfast, lunch and dinner available at the school pantry, as well as on-the-go snacks. She said the pantry is also stocked with canned food, cereal, milk and “whatever someone may need.” She said the clothing drive is also donation-based.
“It’s donations from families, teachers’ friends, people from around Juneau, they send in what clothes they don’t want,” Galvin said. “We have a washer and dryer at our school, so students take turns helping washing and drying them, and then we fold them up and hang them up and put them away.”
Galvin said Yaaḵoosgé has more at-need students than JDHS, and along with the clothing and food pantry, the alternative high school offers support with housing and job opportunities.
“I’ve seen many students come from JD to Yaaḵoosgé for reasons like that — they aren’t supported at home so they get the extra support at Yaaḵoosgé,” she said.
She said any student can join the council group. Galvin said she thinks it creates a positive school environment by starting conversations.
“My counselor would pick ‘Grit’ students to go orchestrate a circle in their advisories and I’ve done that a few times,” Galvin said. “I’d ask about their day and ask them what changes they want in the school. That way they can also be a part of ‘Grit’ and their voices can be heard without them having to be a group member. I’d tell the counselor what I heard and be that middle person.”
Galvin said the experience taught her leadership is setting an example for others to follow.
“It doesn't matter what you go through,” she added. “Your life is your life, and whatever you want to be, you can be it. You just need to put in the work and do what you actually want to do with your life.”
Galvin is graduating high school a year early and is technically a junior. She took extra online classes and worked to earn credits outside of school.
“I've gone through a lot of things that made me grow up fast, and I think just wanting to start my life early and get out of high school so I can start working and move on to the things that I want to do is what made me really want to get out of high school early,” she said.
Galvin plans to take a gap year in Juneau before pursuing cosmetology school for hair and nails, and later wants to study elementary education. She said she completed a summer internship with Sealaska Heritage Institute, where she taught art to children and read to them at local libraries, which inspired her to be a teacher.
Ruby Lea, 17, Raven Homeschool
Ruby Lea says she could have graduated high school more than a year ago, but staying enrolled makes it easier to continue college where she’s already about one-third of the way toward earning her degree.
If that seems like a lot of work, she also has about three gigabytes of creative writing documents on her computer that so far haven’t been published. Plus plenty of traditional creations, including a painting in the Juried Youth Art Exhibit at Celebration next month.
The intense mix of learning, creativity and exploring beyond the typical walls of a classroom has occurred since Lea became a Raven Homeschool student in the fourth grade. A lifelong Juneau resident, she attended Mendenhall River Community School through the third grade, but it didn’t feel like an ideal fit.
“I was just not great at socializing with people my age, so it was helpful to be able to take that step back and just personalize my school,” she said.
A similar mindset was held by other family members, including her brother Xander, 20, who started sixth grade at Raven the same year she entered. Lea said her mom, Carrie, “didn't have a great middle school experience,” and her dad, Ken, as a former school district employee also thought homeschool was a good option.
Lea said her mom has been her at-home teacher and she’s been working with the same advisory teacher at Raven over the years.
“I liked it,” she said. “It was really nice to be able to choose specific interests…There's credits you have to meet and there's points you have to meet, tests you have to be able to do, but even if you're getting that same information you can personalize it in the way it works with your brain, the way you see information with the things that specifically interest you.”
That’s meant opportunities from “really interesting classes” to a 10-day school trip to Spain and Portugal, to trips to Central and South America with her family.
“One (class) that I tell people about the most is ‘Movies as Literature,’ where we watch movies and write book reviews on the movies,” Lea said, noting the movies are classics that often have book adaptations for possible comparison, rather than the latest production on Netflix.
Writing is also the creative endeavor Lea said she wants to pursue as a career, hopefully as a developmental editor for creative writing and publishing projects.
“I've worked with friends over time,” she said. “I had my two best friends when I was younger, who were also writers, and so we would write together and work on each other's stories, which is why I want to go into editing. Because writing is the thing I like to do I know myself well enough that if it was my job I wouldn't want to do it anymore.”
Lea said the three gigabytes of files on her computer include a lot of short stories and “there's a few years where I wrote a lot of poetry — really cheesy teenage poetry.” Also taking up a lot of that space is a story with about 30 drafts so far.
“I don't even know how to explain it,” she said. “It's a high fantasy and it's about a girl who is in a magical-type world, and instead of being an overly powerful character she has a rare disease that makes it so she can't use her power without making herself seriously sick. And so she has this really unique perspective on how the world works around her and how people see people who are a little bit different or less powerful.”
Her artistic interests also include playing the piano for as long as she can remember and later, taking up painting.
“Piano was always my thing and the rest of my family is very artistic,” she said. “And I remember when I was younger I said something to my mom that I wanted to be good at art. She said ‘It's OK, piano is your talent.’ And I'm like, ‘But I want to be good at art.’ So I just practiced a lot. I do visual art and graphic design, watercolor and acrylic, some pastels. I can do metal engraving, piano, crochet, other random stuff.”
Homeschooling meant being able to learn subjects at her own pace, which is why she was able to complete the credits necessary for a diploma during what at a traditional school would have been her junior year, Lea said.
“It was a lot of books and videos that we would watch and go through, and then if we had questions or were struggling (my mom) would help us find the resources to continue that way,” she said. “So there's a lot of self-guided.”
Along the way her grades also qualified her to become a National Honor Society member, which has led to involvement in community projects ranging from restoration of a historic cemetery in Douglas to childcare at a library program for parents of children with autism.
The accelerated pace to higher-level coursework also allowed her to become a dual-enrollment student at the University of Alaska Southeast, where Lea says she is now about 30% of the way toward earning her bachelor’s degree in English. One of the reasons she returned for a “true senior” year in high school is the allotments available through Raven that help cover tuition.
Last summer she participated in an internship through Sealaska Heritage Institute that included a project about traditional plants in Southeast Alaska and their medicinal uses. Lea is working this summer at Travel Juneau’s information kiosk downtown, helping the thousands of arriving cruise tourists find their way around.
The passengers are a group of people she’s familiar with since both of her parents work for cruise lines, which she said allowed them to cruise to more than a dozen countries in the Americas, most within the past four years.
“We did Honduras, Colombia, Belize, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Aruba — like, all over,” she said, naming a few other countries as well.
Her trip to Spain and Portugal with about 50 Raven students statewide occurred last year, Lea said. She said it allowed her to learn plenty of practical things, in addition to history and culture, not typically taught in classrooms.
“I was actually talking about this with my coworker earlier — it’s just little things like cobblestone,” she said. “Portugal has beautiful — every single piece in the cobblestone is handcrafted and you can watch them shape it — and if a single piece comes dislodged it creates a ripple, like a pothole, and seeing those and tripping on those is different than just reading that they don't use typical cement.”
Raven’s graduation ceremonies, in addition to speakers and other proceedings, feature a display table for each student. Lea said hers will feature “random silly photos,” and “probably some paintings and maybe some sheet music.”
When asked if there’s anything different she’d have done looking back on her school years and choices, Lea said “I would have liked to do more skiing, but that has more to do with we didn't have a proper car to get up the mountain.” But while she has no regrets about the path she set for herself, “homeschool isn't for everybody.”
“First off you need parents who are willing to understand their own kids, understand their learning needs,” she said. “The fact that my mom recognized that my brother just wanted to read, and that I just wanted more time to do what I wanted and study what was actually interesting to me.”
“What I really just needed was to know what I'm interested in, know how to learn, and know how to pay attention and work with people, which isn't necessarily, in my opinion, done in public schools,” she added. “It really has to do with, do you understand a kid? Do you understand what they need or do not need out of school, and are you willing to put in the effort yourself to make sure that your kid is learning and passing tests?”
Zoë Lessard, 17, Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé
Zoë Lessard’s four years of high school were largely defined by community engagement and bridging communication gaps, which she said built skills she plans to use in a career of science education and outreach.
“I would like to maybe design science curriculum,” Lessard said. “It would allow me to learn how to connect with people more easily, because I see a gap with that. Lots of amazing scientific research is being done, but it's hard to translate that to children in schools or even just the general public when all of these big words are being used.”
Lessard participated in a high school internship program through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where she developed materials for Sea Week, designed lab activities for classrooms, and helped out with elementary and middle school STEM nights.
“We just made a lot of things happen,” Lessard said. “It was a really exciting year, and it was really fun to work in elementary and middle schools all year long.”
She said her marine biology teacher and cross country coach Kristin Wells helped encourage her to pursue a science-based career.
“Seeing traits of myself in her made me feel like I could go into STEM and perform well in that field,” she said.
This fall, she’s headed to Western Washington University’s Honors College to major in environmental science with an emphasis in marine science and a minor in education.
“If you had asked me just a couple years ago what I wanted to do with my life or what I wanted to do with college, I probably wouldn't have ever said STEM or going into a science degree,” she said. “My teachers really showed me that it's a world I could step into, that you can still have emotion and compassion for things you're studying in science, which was a side of it I didn't really get to see as often.”
She embraced that compassion working with the Alaska Youth for Environmental Action. The summer of her junior year, Lessard attended a summit where she met 30 other students and learned about how climate change was impacting other towns and villages. From that experience, she created a film called “Changing Tides” exploring teen experiences with environmental changes.
“It talks about teens in Alaska, or specifically Juneau, and how we see climate change, and we see it affecting our daily lives,” Lessard said. “It was made to go to the legislators or to our lawmakers to encourage them to protect Alaska and our environment.”
This year, she was voted in as community outreach coordinator for the Juneau chapter of AYEA and spoke at a protest against the proposed Alaska natural gas pipeline.
“It was very powerful to be part of an ongoing movement and part of a protest that had a very direct goal and meaning,” she said. “I protest a lot, I think it's, it's very inspiring, very fun. But a lot of the protests are more generally worded. This one was very anti-one thing, which I think allowed us to get to a point of seeing the community and having deeper conversations around that. Even getting to speak to someone who viewed the opposite to me was very enriching and very cool.”
The gasline protest was not her first foray into public speaking. Her sophomore year was spent at Thunder Mountain High School in the midst of consolidation efforts, and she frequently spoke at school board meetings protesting the move.
“As a sophomore, I was really inspired to speak at those meetings because in my freshman year I was a student at JD that had been transferred to TM, so I felt like I had a unique perspective on the consolidation,” Lessard said. “While I might not agree with every single thing I said when I was a sophomore now, I recognized the strength in me being able to go up and say it.”
She continued speaking up about issues in the district as a student representative on the Juneau Board of Education. In October, she testified at a meeting on behalf of teachers during more than a year of contract negotiations. She also wrote a statement signed by JDHS student government and sent to the school board stating, “We do not support your decision to leave teachers and support staff with insufficient contracts.”
“I got the opportunity to see my teachers there every month,” Lessard said. “It was heartbreaking. It was hard to see, but I was able to let other students, my other peers know what was happening. No one really knew they were going through that. There might have been some offhanded comments from the teachers, but we didn't really know how serious it was. And so getting to be the informer or the messenger of that was a really weird, cool experience. A little nerve-wracking.”
Aside from academics and activism, she has also been active in sports for the past four years. Lessard was captain of the cross country team this year, a Nordic ski team captain for her senior and junior years, and a member of the track and field team.
“They really provide a community and a fun thing to do at the end of the day that gets my mind off some of the homework and some of the outside stress that just will naturally follow you as a high schooler,” Lessard said. ”The coaches and the people I met there really pushed me and really inspired me, and were a big reason I'm doing what I want to do today.”
Another person she credited with inspiring her to chase her curiosities is her mother, a nurse at Bartlett Regional Hospital.
“She is a really amazing person who always leads with her heart, and if she really wants to do something, she will do it,” she said. “Being raised by a woman like that really sets you up for success, and I feel like she really did. She really pushed me through the hard days, and let me explore things that I thought would be good for me and just discover who I was.”
Lessard said the biggest lesson she took away from her high school career was surrounding herself with a physical community. After graduation, she plans to visit family and explore hiking trails around town.
“Being comfortable with yourself and reaching out to create your own community and being part of your own community is very important, especially for younger people,” she said. “Having a physical community, especially in this online age, is worth its weight in gold. Everybody that I've met in person and gone out of my way to talk to and work with has just gotten me out of my shell so much more, improved my ideas and my opportunities.”
• Contact Jasz Garrett at jasz@juneauindependent.com or (907) 723-9356. Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306. Contact Ellie Ruel at ellie.ruel@juneauindependent.com.
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