Community Corner
Meet This Week's Whiz Kid: Shelly Cler
This top student makes time for studies, sports and community service, all while demonstrating maturity that "exceeds her years."
Name: Michelle “Shelly” Cler
Age: 18
School: Senior at Timothy Christian High School
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Achievement: Shelly is in the top 5 percent of her class, but she still manages to have time for sports, youth group leadership and mission trips.
Key to Awesomeness: Shelly was nominated as this week’s “Whiz Kid” by one of our readers, Denise Erlich Niederman. “[Shelly] has been involved in mission work since seventh grade, helping those in need,” says Niederman. “She is a harpist and an artist. She is actively involved in cross country and track and field at her high school.”
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Through her involvement at Elmhurst Christian Reformed Church, as well as through a friend’s church, Immanuel Lutheran, Shelly has traveled to Nashville, Tenn., to help rebuild dormitories for underprivileged kids in the wake of last summer’s flooding, and she's helped patch roofs in Kentucky. She also regularly does clean-up projects in the Chicago area as a service project to assist a woman’s organization. Right here in Elmhurst, she volunteers for PADS (Public Action to Deliver Shelter), helping the homeless in DuPage County.
Besides being active in the senior high youth groups at her church, Nine: twenty-three and The Edge, Shelly has also gone through training to become a leader for Maximum Velocity, the middle school youth group for girls at Elmhurst CRC.
After graduation this summer, Shelly will head to Waco, Texas, where she will attend Baylor University to study either pre-med or pre-dentistry.
The distance to Waco will make Niederman’s two children, ages 4 and 7, undoubtedly very sad. For the past few years, Shelly has been a favorite babysitter for the kids.
“She is extremely responsible,” says Niederman, adding that Shelly has been trusted to pick up the children, make them dinner and put them to bed. “She has shown impeccable judgment and my kids respect and love her.”
Niederman says the key to Shelly’s awesomeness not only comes in the form of her service in helping others and her excellence in academics and sports, but stems from her maturity level. “[It] far exceeds her years,” says Niederman. “[She possesses] incredible compassion and humility despite all of her accomplishments.”
