Local Spotlight: Brooke Helgesen

In the 1985 movie The Breakfast Club, five very different high school students discover that they have much more in common than they previously thought.

Today, in Saco, Thornton Academy junior Brooke Helgesen spends a lot of her free time making sure that every student – regardless of their physical or mental ability -- feels included and valued in the classroom, the gymnasium and on the athletic fields.

Helgesen, 17, is the president of the local Best Buddies club at Thornton Academy. That club is dedicated to building one-on-one relationships between students with and without intellectual and development disabilities.

According to its website, Best Buddies is a global, non-profit organization, dedicated to ending the social, physical and economic isolation of roughly 200 million people with intellectual and developmental disabilities by helping them form meaningful friendships with their peers.

Brooke’s involvement with the Best Buddies program goes back several years to when she was a seventh-grade student.

“I was kind of born into it,” she laughed. “My mom was very involved with the local Best Buddies program. My older brother was on the Unified Basketball team, and I was just always there for his practices and games; so they asked me to be the team manager.”

Brooke estimates that there are between 20 and 30 volunteers involved with the local Best Buddies program. Although her role as president of the Thornton Academy Best Buddies Club is time-consuming, she says that she “loves” the work and strongly supports the organization’s mission.

“The Best Buddies club is a place where everybody is included and everyone has the same opportunities,” Brooke said. “We all just hang out, we help each other, include each other. We go out of our way to make each other’s day better.”

Brooke says the biggest reward of being involved with Best Buddies is seeing the smiles of the other club members.

“I hope that I can just make someone’s day better,” she said. “And that they feel included and don’t see that they are different than anyone else.”

In addition to being involved with Best Buddies, Brooke is also involved with Thornton Academy’s Unified Basketball program and the school’s Unified Bocce team.

Thornton Academy was recently recognized as a Special Olympics Unified Champion School, and is one of five schools in Maine to hold that distinction.

To qualify to be a Special Olympics Unified Champion School, a school must meet 10 national standards of excellence.

To meet these standards, schools must offer Special Olympic Unified Sports where students with and without disabilities train and compete as teammates. They also must have inclusive youth leadership and whole-school engagement activities that promote social inclusion.

Brooke is a partner on the team, working with a fellow student named Sami, a sophomore student.

In a previous interview with Saco Bay News, Brooke said her friends with disabilities have taught her resilience, compassion and dedication.

“Some of the students we have class with here at [Thornton], play sports with, and have lunch with, may have different abilities, but we are all teenagers going to the same school, and we have the same interests,” she said.

In addition to Best Buddies and the school’s Unified Basketball team, Brooke also plays volleyball and is involved in competitive dance.

After graduating next year, Brooke is hoping to go to college and study nursing.

“Being part of Best Buddies is so rewarding,” Brooke says. “I love how everyone feels valued and leaves with a smile on their face.”

Randy Seaver is a cranky, nearly insufferable malcontent living in Biddeford. He is a retired newspaper editor and the principal of a small strategic communications consulting firm. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Publisher Liz Gotthelf contributed to this story.