Leadership Development

Shayna Coello was recently elected as a Supreme Court attorney, and she’s just 16.

Coello, a junior at Pace High School, participated in the Lorenzo de Zavala Youth Legislative Session (LDZ) last week offered by the National Hispanic Institute (NHI).

LDZ gave Coello and hundreds of others from around the state and nation the opportunity to form political parties and argue cases at the Capitol building in Austin.

“We argue the questions that are being asked of the House of Representative,” Coello said. “Questions that make you form your own ideas instead of borrowing someone else’s.”

Coello, as a Supreme Court attorney, argued that raising college tuition does not reroute Latinos from receiving a better quality of education.

“I don’t think raising tuition costs is hurting us because I don’t think cost should matter,” she said.

This is the 25th anniversary of LDZ, and the anniversary of the first time a group of Latinos students met at the state Capitol to debate in the House of Representatives, said NHI founder Ernesto Nieto.

“Out of the interaction between Austin and Valley kids in LDZ, the decision was made that we were going to go statewide,” Nieto said. “It’s grown more than we could imagine, and we’re proud to say it started in Texas.”

Seventy thousand students have since participated in LDZ, which now has extensions in Colorado, New York, Monterrey, Chicago, Argentina and Spain.

The program might not have expanded if Nieto and his wife/NHI vice president Gloria de Leon hadn’t changed their original mission.

“I think the assumption on the part of NHI was that all Latinos would see their community as a destination where they would want to remain, participate in and flourish,” de Leon said. “We were much more skilled focused in the early years.”

As a result, students involved in NHI were going to Ivy League universities and consequently abandoning their Latino community. NHI became just another thing to put on a resume, de Leon said.

“What we should have been doing is building a community of constituents,” she said.

NHI has since included programs for college and post-graduate students instead of just high school aged students, to continue the “dialogue about issues in the Latino community,” de Leon said.

De Leon was raised in McAllen and has been heavily recruiting students from the Valley for NHI programs like the Young Leaders Conference (YLC) for ninth graders, LDZ for sophomore and juniors, Collegiate World Series for juniors, and the Mexico Language Program for seniors.

“We learned that if we assume that we can send our children off without mentoring then they’re going to be susceptible and open to other influences,” de Leon said. “We must remain involved through out their formal education.”

Coello says she will be involved in NHI for a long time, and looks at the programs as a way to develop her leadership skills.

She was involved in YLC her freshman year, and competed in extemporaneous speaking. She beat out more than 50 other students to be in the “elite eight.”

“I enjoy the intensity of the programs,” she said. “You have to push yourself to think because they don’t give you the answers.”