Dallas Weddle is a junior at South Side.
He was also honored with the Outstanding Youth Award from the Mayor’s Youth Council during the City of Jackson’s Children’s Day celebration on Friday, April 26.
“I was told a few days ago that I would be getting an award here, but I’m not sure I deserve it,” Weddle said after the ceremony. “I’m just a guy that goes to school and do my best every day in the classroom and try to encourage others to do the same.”
Weddle is involved in a number of extracurricular activities, and he has plans to attend Tennessee State for college with the intention of becoming a pediatric oncologist and treat childhood cancer for a career.
“I want to do something that will possibly change people’s lives for the better,” Weddle said.
This was the second year for the City to celebrate Children’s Day.
Christiana Gallagher, the community relations coordinator for the city, put the event together and invited Elvia Trejo, the City’s neighborhood specialist who coordinated last year’s inaugural event, to be the keynote speaker this year.
She spoke of how she has three children of her own and how much children were celebrated in her house growing up.
“We have a day each year for mothers and fathers and grandparents, but why not celebrate the children too?” Trejo said. “That was my mother’s philosophy, and it’s something I hoped the City would want to be involved in too.”
The City did get involved in it with consecutive events celebrated at Jackson City Hall.
Trejo said the plan and hope is to expand the celebration and hopefully make it a more public event at a park somewhere in town.
“We had a big celebration a couple years ago at theLOCAL, and if we brought that back and the City were to somehow be involved in that, that would be great,” Trejo said. “That part is still open-ended at this point, but hopefully we’ll see an expanded celebration soon.”
Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news
