Webster City Rotary President Kirk McCullough, left, and speaker Nate Clayberg congratulate Webster City High School senior Brooklin Watson, on being one of the youth leaders honored Sunday.

For 76 years, Webster City Rotarians have been honoring Hamilton County high school students for their achievements academically, as well as for their community involvement.

On Sunday, 26 area seniors followed that tradition.

Among those being honored by the Webster City Rotary Club during its 76th Annual Youth Leadership Banquet at the Briggs Woods Conference Center were eight youth leaders from the South Hamilton School District, 16 from the Webster City Community School District, and two Rotary Youth Leadership Award recipients, also from Webster City High School.

Rotarian Mark Dohms spoke about the Rotary Youth Leadership Awards, or RYLA.

“Leadership is the focus, the entire focus of RYLA.”

RYLA first began in Australia, he said, before moving to the west coast of the U.S., then spreading across the country. This is the 13th year that the Webster City Rotary Club has participated in RYLA, he said. “We have sent students every year for this RYLA training and they come back, well usually quite energized and say it was one of the most exciting times of their lives.”

The students who are chosen attend a six-day-long program, held at Grinnell College in recent years. “Applicants are usually students who have finished their sophomore year, or maybe their junior year. They have excelled at their high school with their involvement in many things. They have proven leadership experience or they have shown leadership potential. Our former RYLA students have always been really great ambassadors at the school and an asset to school,” Dohms said.

This year’s RYLA students, Allie Severe and Jakaela Cherry, were presented by Dohms.

The Webster City students were given their honors by Webster City High School Principal Richard Hutchinson are: Brian Alaniz, Hank Christeson, Caroline Ehn, Olivia Gallentine, Ethan Harms, Luke Holberg, Karina Murray, Cael Nixon, Sydney Oswald, Emersen Paukert, Adysen Poppen, Alondra Johnson-Santana, Gabe Ruby, Lydia VanDeer, Alivia Wahlert and Brooklin Watson.

The South Hamilton students were given their honors by South Hamilton High School Principal Todd Coy. They are: Austin Babcock, Caitlin Bare, Jagger Ferrie, Sydnee Flaugh, Nevaeh Nelson, Mayra Olvera-Ordonez, Landon Sogard and Thomas Wirth.

As dinner was winding down Sunday, Nate Clayberg, a 1993 graduate of WCHS and himself a Rotary honoree in 1992, talked about the challenges of figuring out what you want to do after high school.

Prior to the dinner, Clayberg, who was the keynote speaker, talked about his work.

“The work I do now with what’s called the CAPS Network, which stands for the Center for Advanced Professional Studies. It’s a professional-based learning program that began out of Kansas City and I was brought in (my background is in education, but it’s economic development and workforce) to make connections between business and industry and education. And during that time in economic development I got companies to start talking about how they are worried about the future workforce supply.

“And when we get engaged it’s like how do we get education and businesses working together? Over the last eight years you start talking to students and getting to know them and where they’re going, but also about the questions of what’s next for them. And in today’s culture, it’s trying to figure out what is that? Is it college, is it work, is it what?”

Clayberg said that it was while he was working at a radio internship in North Carolina that his contact always said: “If you can’t give somebody money, give them time. And I always took that to heart. How can you give time to young people and allow them to ask questions to give them that comfort level to explore and try to understand some things that are out there in the world, and what kind of direction can you give?”

During his speech, Clayberg told the students, “I think job changes are seven or eight times in your career. There’s a statistic out there that by 2035, 70% of the jobs that exist today won’t exist then. Which means 70% of the jobs that exist then don’t exist now. So how do we prepare you for that and start thinking about that? Instead of just high school to college to job, let’s think where we’re trying to get to and reverse engineer back.”

In talking about choosing a career, Clayberg said, “You can find out what that job is and you can Google how to get it, but it’s you that has to understand why you want to do it. That’s what drives it. And then you get into where am I going to learn more about this? And what kind of training or schooling or whatever’s gonna help me get to that in the learning piece? But this is where I love it. Who can you get connected to to learn more about it? And again, I’ll lean back on people in this room. There’s a lot of community leaders here that know a lot of other community leaders and people all around the world that can help get you connected to an interest that you might have if it’s not in Webster City, Iowa.”

At the conclusion of the event, a few of the students being honored shared their thoughts about Clayberg’s address.

Gabe Ruby said, “The idea of what’s after high school can be scary, but if you really sit down and think of the possibilities that are set forth in front of you. You dissect them and really think about what’s possible, that choice of what you can do becomes a bit more clear and the path you can take, instead of it being mud, turns into water.”