Cheney High grad embraces leadership role
The voice of senior Riley Potter is one with which Cheney High School students are quite familiar.
As a freshman, Potter stood in front of the whole student body and gave a speech that detailed why she should be the sophomore representative on the Associated Student Body.
As a sophomore, she was reelected to be the ASB junior representative.
And as a junior, she was picked to be the vice president, meaning she would read the announcements every day and lead the student body in the pledge.
“She’s just a warm personality,” said Jeff Roberts, assistant principal and ASB adviser at Cheney High School. “She totally represents the kind of student we want Cheney producing here.”
Three years on ASB is a rarity, Roberts said, as the path Potter took is really the only way to do it. But the experience she gained every year gave her insights into how administrators, teachers and students can work well together, and how to be a strong leader.
“I feel like I’ve been able to get an inside scoop of how high school is run and how things really work,” Potter said. “It’s been a really cool opportunity to be out in front of the school and get to have some of my ideas implemented in some places, and to see what other students care about.”
Potter has remained engaged with classes through online learning – though she doesn’t get to read announcements every day since the COVID-19 pandemic struck. And her leadership role has continued.
“She’s very intelligent. We were on a Zoom meeting (recently), and just the insight she has, for being so young,” Roberts said. “She’s beyond her years a little bit with the maturity she has.”
Born in Thailand to American parents who taught there at an international school, Potter said she was “the only blonde-haired, green-eyed kid” at her elementary school. Though her family moved when she was 6, Potter still has friends who live across the world.
When her family traveled to Europe two summers ago, for example, they stayed with old friends in nearly every city they visited.
“We lived as a Scottish person would live for five days,” she said. “It’s helped us all be more appreciative for diversity and travel and people’s different experiences.”
Those international trips have continued to develop her love of travel and a comfort with being in new places, as well as a desire to see the United States from an outsider’s perspective, she said.
That has her leaning toward a major related to international studies at Westmont College in California, which she plans to attend this fall. It also happens to be where her older sister Elizabeth – Riley is the second of four daughters in the family – goes to college.
Her other choice was Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., but she said she just couldn’t commit to a school that she hadn’t visited, and she canceled that visit in March.
“That was hard for me to turn down, but I feel like Westmont will be a better fit for me,” she said. “It is in Santa Barbara. That was a total win. I love being outside, getting my feet dirty in the sand.”
Potter missed out on her senior track season, and she was looking forward to all those senior traditions her class won’t get to experience. However, she said she has also accepted that hers will be “a very special class” to end their high school career during a pandemic, and that this is only the end to one chapter of her life.
“Cheney just has such amazing teachers who invested in me so much and cared about me so much more than a student,” Potter said. “The underclassmen I didn’t get to say goodbye to, but I am excited to be moving on to something new.”