Family & Education

From Bethesda Magazine: Extraordinary Teens 2026

Meet 10 local high students going above and beyond in their passions and communities

Robin L. Flanigan

Amy Reinink

Jillian Lynch

March 30, 2026 3:00 p.m. | Updated: March 25, 2026 5:02 p.m.

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Charlie Rollins

Thomas S. Wootton High School

A series of racially charged incidents at Rockville’s Thomas S. Wootton High School during the 2024-2025 school year led to the threat of a walkout during a pep rally. Charlie Rollins, treasurer of the Student Government Association (SGA) and the Black Student Union (BSU), brokered a discussion between the SGA and the BSU and introduced a new plan to the student body.

The pep rally became a time for sharing powerful stories about experiences with racism and advocating for cultural change at the school in the form of more positive daily interactions among students. After the rally, students and staff moved to the school’s commons for a moment of silence.

Charlie, now an 18-year-old senior, recalls feeling proud of the outcome. “Nowadays it’s very hard to get high schoolers passionate about issues, especially when those issues don’t concern them directly,” says the current SGA co-president and BSU vice president.

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Charlie’s racial advocacy work earned a citation of excellence from Maryland state Del. Jheanelle Wilkins, for sustained advocacy in combatting administrative failures to address hate incidents, according to Charlie.

After a shooting at Wootton in February, Charlie was part of a group that met with the MCPS superintendent. “We voiced our concerns and provided alternative solutions for the future,” Charlie says via text message.

This school year, he also created a program for upperclassmen to help underclassmen find summer internship opportunities, and provide resources and advice.

A member of the Science National Honor Society, Charlie tutors students in biology, chemistry and physics, and serves as vice president of Students Stand with Soldiers, a school club that assembles care packages for ill and wounded service members.

Chelsea Zhu

Richard Montgomery High School

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When Chelsea Zhu speaks, the 18-year-old’s thoughts flow intentionally from one topic to the next, whether it’s about climate change, artistry or language.

Chelsea is the 2025 Maryland Youth Poet Laureate, an honor presented by New York City-based Urban Word, the organization that named Amanda Gorman the first national Youth Poet Laureate, and Words, Beats & Life, a Washington, D.C.-based arts education nonprofit. Chelsea, who lives in Rockville, was commissioned to write and perform a poem about D.C. for the 2025 Smithsonian Folklife Festival by Words, Beats & Life.

“I’m continually getting to perform my poetry,” Chelsea says. As a state-level youth poet laureate, Chelsea has attended virtual programming, such as a talk led by Ada Limón, a former Poet Laureate of the United States. “That community and that ability to know that you have people with you who can create change and who really see you as an artist and as a creative has really pushed me through writing and pushed me to explore social justice and activism and advocacy in a way I’ve never done before.”

Chelsea was a Montgomery County Youth Poet Laureate finalist in 2023 and 2024. She won the 2024 Gaithersburg Book Festival poetry contest for high school students with “Voyage to the Exoplanet,” which was published in an environmentally focused poetry anthology, The Nature of Our Times. She has had several other works published, and her poem “Lowcountry Haibun” is slated to appear in the South Carolina Review this spring.

A senior in the International Baccalaureate program at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Chelsea sometimes asks her English teachers for feedback on her work. What stands out, says Bonnie Peyer, who is one of those teachers, is Chelsea’s “ability to put herself in a lot of scenarios that I wasn’t expecting … to really imagine very different contexts and places and people than our everyday experience.”

Chelsea says her teachers have encouraged her to share her writing with others and taught her ways to experiment with different forms of poetry. “She’s a poet who puts a lot of thought into what she’s saying and how she’s saying it and why she’s saying it,” says Jack Smith, an English composition assistant at Richard Montgomery.

Chelsea began writing poetry when she was 7 or 8, she says. She grew up in a primarily Mandarin-speaking household and says “poetry gravitated toward” her as “a close friend” that helped her understand her emotions and the world.

At her school, Chelsea is co-president of the student-led Writing Center, president of the equity board and co-president of the math honor society. She’s also the co-chair of the Aspen Hill Library
Advisory Committee.

A competitive figure skater, Chelsea was selected for the 2025 U.S. Figure Skating Scholastic Honors Team, made up of 10 high school skaters recognized for excellence in the sport, academics and community service. Chelsea wants to pursue a career that combines technology and creativity.

—Jillian Lynch

Pietra Maschioro

Our Lady of Good Counsel High School

A senior at Our Lady of Good Counsel High School in Olney, Pietra Maschioro, 17, enjoys creating art, performing in speech competitions for her school, dancing as a majorette—also with her school—and even just drawing with her younger half sister.

Pietra was born and raised in Montgomery County and her parents are from Brazil. She lives with her mom in Silver Spring. She represents her heritage in school as president of the Latino Student Association, a position she’s held since her sophomore year.

Pietra says she was 10 years old and on a vacation in the Dominican Republic, when she slipped on a waterslide and knocked out her two front teeth. Finding quick access to a dentist proved to be a challenge, and she couldn’t get adequate care in time to save the teeth. As a result, she wears a prosthetic along with braces, which at first left her feeling “lost,” she says.

Graphic novels by Raina Telgemeier, including Smile, which is about the author’s experiences growing up after having teeth knocked out, inspired Pietra to pursue her dreams, she says. That includes a career as a surgeon. “I don’t want [other kids] to feel like their life is over because they look a certain way,” Pietra says.

Pietra volunteers each week at MedStar Montgomery Medical Center in Olney. In December, she started volunteering at the Sandy Spring Volunteer Fire Department and is on track to become a licensed emergency medical technician in May. As a freshman at Good Counsel, she was accepted into a four-year engineering program called Project Lead the Way, where she built a prototype of a robotic prosthetic arm during her sophomore year.

“Other kids will want to go to college, eventually medical school. She wants to jump into that now to help others now, and learning literally hands-on,” says Edward Owusu, principal of Good Counsel.

Pietra says she participated in a national speech competition in Chicago in April 2025, where she gave a dramatic performance.

“Her biggest performance strength is her ability to capture very viscerally how somebody is feeling and then convey that to an audience,” says Chuck Ehrman, her speech and debate coach who is also an assistant principal at Good Counsel. “And that’s voice, it’s body language, it’s facial expressions—it’s all that stuff.”

—J.L.

Jack Vogel

Richard Montgomery High School

As a child, Jack Vogel loved building model airplanes with his father, Jason Vogel. Jason, who had muscular dystrophy, eventually lost the motor skills needed to build the planes but still spent hours beside Jack at a workbench in their Rockville home’s garage. Jack’s father died in March 2024, when he was 48 and Jack was 16.

Now an 18-year-old senior at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Jack says his passion for aviation and rocketry was sparked during those hours building planes with his dad. As part of the Rockville Science Center Explorer Post 1010 rocketry team, Jack helped build and launch a rocket that earned second place for vehicle design in NASA’s 2024 Student Launch competition in Huntsville, Alabama.

He also earned a scholarship to attend Aim High Flight Academy, a three-week flight training program in Bakersfield, California, sponsored by the U.S. Air Force. Before the academy, Jack had never flown a plane. He studied for the academy, which included hours of flight with instructors, and spent his downtime there “chair flying,” which involves sitting in a chair and mentally running through procedures as if he were in an aircraft. His muscle memory and situational awareness earned him the ability to be trusted with a solo flight at the end of the program, a privilege not awarded to all students.

Jack spent several summers working on his grandparents’ farm in Nebraska, and the landscaping knowledge he gained led him and a friend to start a landscaping business. Jack also runs track and field, wrestles and practices jiujitsu.

His grandfather, George Vogel, of Omaha, Nebraska, recalls watching Jack make his dad’s tea, set up his meals, help him dress and assist with his respirator, “all without being asked.” Jack credits his work ethic to his father.

“By the time he was my age, my dad had gone through multiple organ transplants, and he was in a lot of pain for my whole life,” Jack says. “But every time I came home, he was happy to see me, and ready to help me out. No matter how hard I think I have it, my dad always had it harder. I tell myself: ‘If he can do it, so can I.’ ”

Jack is a “humble kid who prefers to fly under the radar,” says Erica LeBright, a school counselor at Richard Montgomery. “He really cares about his character and is mindful of his actions and how he treats people.”

Jack plans to pursue aviation in college and hopes to become a pilot.

—Amy Reinink

Pieroaolo Baldassari — Photo credit: Jimell Greene

Pierpaolo Baldassari

British International School

Pierpaolo Baldassari had always enjoyed summer sailing camps while visiting his grandparents in Miami. 

But it wasn’t until his family decided to temporarily relocate to Miami in June 2020 that Pierpaolo began sailing competitively. That change led Pierpaolo, now a 17-year-old senior at the British International School of Washington, in Washington, D.C., to progress rapidly in the sport, traveling around the world to compete and eventually becoming a member of the inaugural U.S. Sailing Youth National Team in 2025. Last year, Pierpaolo spent roughly 50 hours per month from January to May training and competing in national regattas. During the summer months, he spent nearly 150 hours training and competing in international competitions per month.

“It’s quite unheard of for someone to go from being new to sailing to accomplishing the extraordinary things he has accomplished,” says Ron Rosenberg of Orcas Island, Washington, one of Pierpaolo’s coaches. “We have a very special athlete and human on our hands with Pierpaolo.”

“I love the strategy aspect of sailing, like you’re playing chess, but your boat is one of the pieces,” says Pierpaolo, who lives in the Somerset neighborhood of Chevy Chase and serves as a member of the Somerset Youth Town Council.

Pierpaolo credits his family as his greatest source of support. He says he enjoys sharing his Italian and Hispanic heritage by organizing Hispanic Heritage Month at his school and hosting cooking nights for friends. He is fluent in English, Spanish and Italian, and proficient in French.

Pierpaolo has traveled to Mexico for Model United Nations conferences twice. He’s co-founder of Baldassari Apparel, a bulk embroidery startup. Under his grandfather’s guidance, Pierpaolo built a supplier network for the business that includes D.C., New York and Italy. 

Kat Deakin, Pierpaolo’s International Baccalaureate physics teacher, says Pierpaolo is “a level-headed, quiet leader who is endlessly positive and polite.”

He participates in varsity soccer and flag football, and he placed second last year while representing his school at the Canada Cup, an interschool downhill skiing competition in British Columbia for middle and high school students.

Pierpaolo earned a scholarship to participate in an internationally focused gap-year program called Baret Scholars. He has also been accepted to Boston College’s Carroll School of Management where he will be enrolled after his gap year.

—A.R.

Naomi Demessie

Wheaton High School

Naomi Demessie spotted something interesting during a stint as a hospital volunteer while spending a summer with family in Nevada in 2023.

Naomi, then 15, noticed that children at the hospital were often reading a book rather than playing video games or watching television. She wondered whether they were missing the intellectual stimulation provided in school and started thinking about how she could bring the benefits of school into the hospital.

Back in Silver Spring in January 2024, Naomi and a friend created the STEMpedic Foundation, a charitable organization that donates STEM activity kits and books to hospitalized children. Science, technology, engineering and math kits can include basic circuitry and robotics components, Lego, solar system model kits or organic chemistry molecule-building sets. After receiving a grant from Youth Creating Change, STEMpedic donated 60 STEM kits to Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore. The organization has given roughly $16,000 worth of STEM kits and books to more than 1,400 children across the country. It also donates to homeless and refugee children.

STEMpedic adviser Katie Rosenthal of Chevy Chase says Naomi’s ability to bring a big idea to reality “blew me away,” and says Naomi is consistently “cool, composed and prepared” when presenting to grant committees.

Naomi, now an 18-year-old senior at Wheaton High School, credits her desire to care for others to her Ethiopian heritage. “I felt such a sense of accomplishment knowing I was helping to provide not only things that children need but that they want—that sense of normalcy and inclusion,” she says.

In addition to being the co-founder of STEMpedic, Naomi organizes blood drives as president of the Wheaton High School Red Cross Club. She leads health screenings and educates Black residents of Montgomery County on disease prevention through the African American Health Program. She volunteers at Metropolitan Washington Ear, a nonprofit that provides reading and information services and training for blind, visually impaired and disabled people. And most afternoons, Naomi works at Silver Spring’s Cannon Road Elementary School’s Kids After Hours, a before- and after-school care program where she leads Lego and robotics clubs, and translates for Amharic-speaking families. She remains active in Youth Creating Change as its co-president.

Katina Chappell, who taught Naomi’s junior year Advanced Placement language and composition class, says Naomi is a star student and a kind person who wrote Chappell a three-page letter expressing gratitude for all she had learned in class.

Naomi was a 2026 Coca-Cola Scholars regional finalist and earned a Certificate in Advanced STEM Research through the Wheaton Advanced Research Project Program. Naomi was accepted to the University of Southern California, where she plans to study global health.

—A.R.

Sylvia Fine

The Siena School

When Sylvia Fine became president of her Silver Spring neighborhood’s civic group, the Springbrook Forest Citizens Association, she was too young to vote. A senior at The Siena School in Silver Spring, she has served on the association’s board since eighth grade.

“14-year-olds aren’t usually having casual conversations with adults of all ages,” she says, referring to neighborhood residents, “but I really enjoy talking to people, and felt this was a way to get to know members of my community.”

An advocate on many levels, Sylvia, now 18, founded her school’s Women in STEM Club, organized a bone marrow drive for the Gift of Life Donor Program, and proposed expanding Narcan access at schools while on the Montgomery County’s SMART Youth Advisory Council.

She also started a political advocacy club at Siena and created a curriculum to educate its members on how to express their concerns to elected officials. In 2025, the club secured a $500,000 state grant for Siena to support students with dyslexia.

When Sylvia is passionate about an issue at school, she’ll think of multiple solutions before soliciting feedback from school administrators, notes Jennifer Chambers, who was Sylvia’s middle school adviser and science teacher. “She’s a very outcome-driven student,” Chambers says. “She doesn’t wait for things to happen in her life. She makes things happen in her life.”

Sylvia has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and dysgraphia, a learning disability that makes it difficult to get her thoughts onto paper.

She also has dyslexia, and says she is grateful for the management tools and strategies her teachers have shared, especially when reading and processing dense legislation. That’s something she had to do while interning with state Del. Joe Vogel, who represents District 17 in Montgomery County, and before testifying against Montgomery County’s controversial University Boulevard Corridor Plan on behalf of her community.

“No matter how long it takes me, I’ll properly read through and digest everything to make sure everyone is properly represented by someone who is capable,” she says, which is also how she approaches pedestrian safety, parking and other neighborhood issues.

Communication skills are one of Sylvia’s strongest assets, says her mother, Alana Fine. When Sylvia was the only member of her political party at a polling site, she offered the opposing campaigners snacks and spent time listening to their ideology. “It was a real example of looking beyond a differing camp and trying to connect,” Alana Fine says.

Sylvia says the reason is simple—and why she wants to be an engineer: “I want to help people.”

—R.L.F.

Ethan Shaw

Georgetown Preparatory School

Ethan Shaw was tasked with doing a project on a marginalized community during his freshman year at Georgetown Preparatory School. As his classmates at the private North Bethesda school for boys chose to do projects about the homeless and people with mental health struggles or disabilities, Ethan, who lives in Bethesda, realized many marginalized identities can be found among veterans.

The project inspired Ethan, now an 18-year-old senior, to create the Georgetown Prep Veteran Aid Club. He partnered with United Soldiers and Sailors of America (USASOA), a Maryland-based nonprofit that helps service members, veterans and their families, and began organizing food drives, barbecues, a 5K run and several other fundraisers. Ethan eventually formed Project STARS (Support Troops and Retired Service Members), a coalition of eight local schools devoted to assisting veterans.

“I thought I’d hear from Ethan once a month or so with the club,” says George Hendren, Veteran Aid’s faculty moderator and Ethan’s Latin teacher. “He came to me every single week with a new event.”

Ethan was born five weeks premature, leading to hearing problems. He says he began wearing a hearing aid in middle school and had to learn “it wasn’t a weakness, but just one small part of me, along with everything else I am.”

Ethan handled a hip fracture during his freshman year of track and field with similar equanimity, spending three months recovering before returning to the team the following season to compete in events ranging from the 55-meter sprint to the 4-by-400-meter relay and the long jump.

His hobby of photographing school athletic events led to a photography business, with clients including Montgomery County Little League and his school.

He is co-president of his school’s Black Student Association (BSA). Ethan has a knack for “quietly counseling younger students on the road ahead,” says Dacque Tirado, Ethan’s Advanced Placement comparative government teacher and BSA faculty moderator.

School officials say Ethan’s academic schedule has been among the most demanding in his class, with nine honors, AP and post-AP classes throughout his time in high school.

Ethan also interns with the USASOA Government Affairs Legislative Team. He is interested in studying political science or international relations in college.

—A.R.

Dylan Zimmerman

Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School

Watching her younger brother deal with episodes of severe nausea and vomiting for months—without a proper diagnosis—left Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School senior Dylan Zimmerman, then an eighth grader, feeling helpless.

Later traced to a congenital condition, her brother’s illness and the frustration she felt helped motivate the Bethesda teenager to be a catalyst for change in health care as a patient advocate and, someday she hopes, a nurse.

As she learned about other health care disparities, that aspiration grew. Dylan, now 17, was the first teen to serve on the Johns Hopkins Patient and Family Advocacy Council and has been a member since 10th grade. Her ideas, since implemented, include patient emails being directed to specific clinicians rather than a general inbox, and health care providers encouraging teens to download the portal app during appointments.

She is doing an internship in nursing research on the impact of mindfulness on cancer patients at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., and shadows nurses there. Last summer, while in a Georgetown University nursing academy, she created a suicide prevention infographic to educate future students.

“Dylan shows tremendous leadership,” says Lynn Huang, who has been Dylan’s Girl Scout troop leader for six years and watched her found a Daisy troop at her former elementary school. “She steps up to make the world a better place in pretty much everything she does.”

Contending that a school policy banning students from bathroom visits during the first and last 10 minutes of classes is punitive for those with menstrual periods, she founded Cycle Without Stigma, a club at B-CC dedicated to equity around menstrual periods—and got the administration to make exceptions to the rule. Dylan is class secretary and a captain of her school’s varsity tennis team.

For her Girl Scout Gold Award project, Dylan developed a workshop for 8- to 12-year-olds about menstrual health through I Support the Girls, a local nonprofit that provides supplies to women in need.

While going through security at Capital One Arena to attend a Washington Capitals game, her rape alarm, considered a “noisemaker,” was confiscated. Dylan wrote to NHL franchises explaining that the alarms are safety devices and should not be banned. Some arenas updated their policies, and the NHL added the issue to the agenda of its leaguewide security meeting, she says. “That was another thing where I was like, ‘Wow, the world really needs someone to speak up for women,’ ” Dylan says.

Dylan has been accepted to the University of Virginia and plans to study nursing.

—R.L.F.

Blakely Pfaff

Rockville High School

Blakely Pfaff was in the car at a drive-thru when her mom noticed Blakely’s entire body quickly convulse. Blakely, a seventh grader at the time, brushed it off as an intense shiver—something she’d experienced with less severity for as long as she could remember.

But from that moment on, the convulsions intensified, and she started to slap things around her and shout. Soon diagnosed with Tourette syndrome, Blakely wrestled with anxiety and embarrassment as she learned strategies for managing the sudden, repetitive and involuntary movements called tics.

“We had to ban the word ‘Tourette’s’ because the more you acknowledge it, the more it’s going to show up,” recalls the Rockville High School senior, who lives in Rockville.

After years of therapy to manage the neurological disorder, Blakely, now 18, uses the word regularly.

Blakely speaks to law enforcement, women’s groups and elementary schools to help destigmatize Tourette’s as a national youth ambassador for the Tourette Association of America. She has lobbied on Capitol Hill for Tourette’s research and special education funding, hosted fundraising events to support research and youth programming, and promoted Tourette Syndrome Awareness Month on television.

“Blakely has a natural magnetic ability to lead that draws people in,” says Rockville High School Principal Rhoshanda Pyles, “and what makes her truly extraordinary is that she has turned her own perseverance into a blueprint for others to follow, proving that her character is defined not by the obstacles she has faced, but by the incredible light she chooses to put back into the world.”

Blakely uses her voice musically as well. A classically trained, five-time Maryland all-state vocalist, she is president of the Rockville High School choral program and received the school’s 2025 Choral Director’s Award. She created Vocal Point, the school’s first student-run a cappella group, and has had the lead role in five musicals, including community theater and school productions.

With a passion for meteorology, Blakely created a “What’s the Weather?” segment for WRAM Rockville and was one of 18 students nationwide to attend the PBS Student Reporting Lab Academy. She’s been accepted to The University of Oklahoma, where she plans to study meteorology.

“You either do the thing or you don’t,” says Blakely, who was the second runner-up in Miss Maryland’s Teen 2025 competition. “There’s no in-between.”

—R.L.F.

2026 Extraordinary Teens Selection Committee

Jordan Edelin is coordinator of written and oral communication at The Universities at Shady Grove’s John and Effie Macklin Center for Academic and Leadership Success.
Jillian Lynch is the associate editor of Bethesda Magazine.
Christina McGill is early college coordinator at Montgomery College.
Kathleen Neary is the editor of Bethesda Magazine.
Yesenia E. Regalado is director of training and community impact at Leadership Montgomery.

This appears in the March/April 2026 issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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Originally published at Bethesdamagazine