Top Teens

Meet the 13 winners of the 2016 Bethesda Magazine Extraordinary Teen Awards

April 7, 2016 1:24 p.m.

Grace Myers

Senior, Walt Whitman High School

While volunteering at a food bank at the Pope Francis Outreach Center in Southeast Washington, D.C., in 2014, Grace Myers noticed a problem. Families formed a long line to get their food, and Grace saw that there were dozens of kids in line with their parents, looking bored. She thought about the way books entertained and comforted her as a child growing up in Bethesda and set out to collect kids’ books from yard sales and Craigslist.com, and through donations. She has since acquired and distributed more than 9,000 books to people visiting the outreach center, with the ultimate goal of increasing childhood literacy in the area.

“Kids get really excited about them, and it makes me feel good to know that I can give them a piece of the kind of childhood I had,” she says.

It was a project she undertook quietly, without fanfare or the need for praise—typical of the 18-year-old senior, says Kari Wislar, her counselor at Walt Whitman High School. Wislar says Grace’s laid-back, unassuming style is a “breath of fresh air” in a school packed with achievers. “She’s a quiet, under-the-radar kid, but when people take the time to get to know her, they’re blown away,” Wislar says. “She has a solid sense of self, and is refreshingly centered.”

- Advertisement -

With a GPA of 3.94, Grace is an editor of The Whitman Journal of Psychology. Additionally, her love of neuroscience led her to intern at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center last summer, reviewing and editing pre-publication reports from doctors at the center about their clinical trials. She hopes to study neuroscience at Georgetown University or Vanderbilt University. If she’s close to home, she plans to continue distributing books at the Pope Francis Outreach Center. If she ends up farther away, she hopes to continue community service with an eye toward increasing literacy.

“This girl has such a mature intellect,” says Whitman English teacher Todd Michaels. “She’s confident in that intellect, but never arrogant—at her age, that’s a difficult needle to thread.”

Digital Partners

Enter our essay contest