Students from Libertyville, Barrington, and Vernon Hills High Schools gathered at YMCA Camp MacLean in Burlington, Wisconsin, for Operation Snowball on Jan. 21 to discuss ways to make healthy, responsible decisions about issues facing teens today.

From 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., students and faculty had the opportunity to participate in prevention workshops, teams courses and small group sessions, as well as listen to motivational speakers.

“The name [Snowball] comes from a snowball rolling downhill, that if you can get two people to make healthy decisions, they’ll start pulling friends in and pretty soon you’ll have a whole, giant snowball: a whole group of kids that are involved in positive activities and making those healthy decisions,” LHS physics teacher Mr. Mark Buesing explained. Mr. Buesing helped develop the Snowball program at Libertyville back in 2000.

Due to decreased participation in Snowball the past few years from Libertyville, Dr. Brenda Nelson — the new Prevention and Wellness Coordinator at LHS — reached out to DOI, theatre, ACE, and girls volleyball to get more students involved in the event.

“This year what I did is I reached out to adults I thought were interested and had some experience with prevention and just asked ‘would you like to bring an existing group to Snowball?’” Dr. Nelson said. “And then I lightly marketed it to some others like Snowflake leaders — I posted it in Google Classroom — and reached out in some various ways and so really it was just a rebuild year.”

This year, Snowball had one main motivational speaker as well as large group workshops and small group time. Camp MacLean even had a toboggan slide students could use.

“We had an hour and a half of just doing icebreaker activities in our cabins, because they had to check out all the kids [from Barrington who got into a bus accident on the way to the camp], but then we listened to the speaker and we did small group, and then we went tobogganing for 45 minutes, and then we did another small group of just talking about our day and what we had learned,” sophomore Kerra Markham recalled. Markham attended Snowball without an existing Libertyville group and was put in a small group of students mixed from Vernon Hills, Barrington, and LHS as well.

The speaker this year, John Morello, is an actor who has seen how drugs affect people first-hand and he also gave some insight on identity and how kids develop this sense of their own selves as they grow up. Morello based his speech on the stories of four different characters who tied together into one storyline.

“The thing I liked about it was that it takes all these different topics, things like depression, suicide attempt, substance abuse, rape, these topics that are very sensitive topics and gives a lot of story and dimension to them, and the thing I like about it is you leave feeling much more compassion and see these issues less as black and white but as people have reasons for doing what they do and we very much want kids to be healthy and make good choices,” Dr. Nelson said.

Operation Snowball’s mission is to guide kids to continue to make good decisions, and for them to meet new teens their age and realize that they are not alone in wanting to live a healthy lifestyle.

“Everyone should do Snowball at least once in their career here at Libertyville. For a lot of kids it’s just an affirmation of what they’re already doing, but for some it’s more than that: I’ve seen one day change kids’ lives; They went from one day thinking they were alone to knowing that they were not alone and that had a profound effect on them,” Mr. Buesing shared.