Santa Clara’s Ms. Estrada Goes to Washington

Later this month, 16-year-old Jennie Estrada of Oxnard will get her first look at the place where she plans to one day work and live.

The junior at Santa Clara High School has been selected to attend the National Young Leaders Conference in Washington, D.C., a gathering of 350 high school students nationwide who have demonstrated leadership potential and academic merit.

The conference, which runs from Feb. 27 to March 3, features welcoming remarks from the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and a panel discussion with members of the National Press Club.

In addition to getting a good look at the nation’s capital, Jennie and other potential future leaders will visit foreign embassies, receive policy briefings from government officials and meet with representatives from the three branches of government and the diplomatic corps.

“I’m really excited,” said Jennie, who had to raise more than $1,000 for the trip. “I wanted to do something that would set me apart from everybody else.”

Each year, 7,000 high school students nationwide are invited to participate in the 20 sessions of the conference, sponsored by the Congressional Youth Leadership Council, a nonprofit educational organization.

Jennie, a straight-A student, was selected on the strength of her academic achievements and the depth of her extracurricular activities.

She has helped at a free legal clinic in Oxnard and a tutoring program at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in that city’s La Colonia barrio.

And she is a member of the mock trial team at Santa Clara High, a private school that she attends on a partial scholarship. Her mother, Letty Alvarez, pays some of the tuition and Jennie pays the rest by working during the summer.

“I’m extremely proud of her,” Alvarez said. “I just get really emotional when I think about it, because when I was her age I was nowhere close to doing anything she is doing.”

When she graduates, Jennie plans to get her undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley, then go to Georgetown in Washington for a graduate degree in international relations. And once she’s back in Washington, she figures she may never leave.

“I want to get accustomed to Washington because I want to live and work there,” she said.

“It seems like a fairly cosmopolitan kind of place.”