A Portfolio Pathway for Grand Haven Students
The package the principals and the superintendent receive.
OpenThe idea, from the service side
A portfolio records growth. A club is where the growth happens.
Grand Haven students are being invited to build a portfolio they own — a living record of learning, skills, projects, service, and real work, kept from eighth grade on and carried into college, careers, and adult life.
Classwork fills part of that record. But the qualities a portfolio most needs to prove — leadership, reliability, service to neighbors — are not learned at a desk. They are practiced in a club, on a project, in front of a community. That practice already has a home in Grand Haven, and it is Kiwanis.
This page is the same pathway seen from the service side: the Kiwanis family of clubs as the wrap around the portfolio — the place where students learn to lead and serve, and where the evidence of that learning is made.
“Many times people fail because they are not coached.”
— The founding principle behind Michael Rutherford’s student pathway work. A Kiwanis club, at its best, is coaching in exactly this sense: adults who show up, week after week, while young people learn to lead.
The introduction
Who’s writing to you
Michael Rutherford, founder of secondchancepathways.com dba rezconnect.store, Grand Haven.
His work sits at the crossing of students, local business, and community: a student affiliate pathway where young people do real work for real merchants with real coaching, and Walk the Beat — the community music effort founded by Dave Palmer and led by its president, Becky Newman — whose mission supports public school music.
The portfolio pathway is the piece that binds that work to the schools. This companion page asks Kiwanis to be its leadership-and-service layer — and it comes to Amy Urick first, for reasons her own record makes plain.
Addressed first to Amy Urick
Amy, this comes to you first because you already hold the threads
Amy Urick serves as the Michigan District Aktion Club Administrator — the title the Kiwanis District of Michigan publishes for her, and the one the district’s magazine, the Michigan Builder, prints alongside her name. It is the right place to start, because the clubs this page is about are the clubs she already serves:
- Michigan District Aktion Club Administrator — named on the Kiwanis District of Michigan’s Aktion Club page and in the Michigan Builder (June/July 2024), which prints her contact as [email protected]
- Advisor to the Tri-Cities Aktion Club — the club that earned Honorable Mention among some 500 Aktion Clubs worldwide for its 2023 video scrapbook
- Tri-Cities Kiwanis leadership — listed as Secretary of the Grand Haven–Spring Lake Kiwanis club (K10786, the Tri-Cities club) in the Michigan Builder club directory, and an author on the club’s own site
- A bridge to the wider community — she holds the Non-Profit seat for Tri-Cities Kiwanis in the Grand Haven Chamber’s Wednesday LEADS networking group
And there is a more direct reason: the operating guidance for this page is already hers. In November 2025, Amy laid out what chartering a school club actually requires — the requirements in the charter section below are her own words, carried here as she gave them. Nobody is better placed to say whether this wrap fits, or what it would take to build it well.
For the Key Club lane specifically, the district names a counterpart worth knowing: the Michigan District Key Club Administrator is Jordan De La Cruz (Kiwanis International communications, 2025) — a natural second conversation, at Amy’s suggestion.
The wrap, rung by rung
Three clubs, one continuous ladder of service
The Kiwanis family meets a young person at every stage — and each stage produces exactly the evidence a portfolio exists to keep.
Middle School · Ages 11–14 · Lakeshore Middle School
Builders Club — where service starts
Builders Club is Kiwanis’s club for middle-school students — the first rung, in the years when Grand Haven’s portfolio pathway opens. At Lakeshore Middle School, Builders would be the on-ramp: first service projects, first offices held, first taste of running something for the community — each one landing in the student’s new portfolio as it happens.
The Kiwanis–Lakeshore relationship is already alive: Tri-Cities Kiwanis holds events at the school, including the Books vs. Badges Hoopla on October 29, 2026. What is not publicly confirmed is whether a Builders Club is currently chartered and active at Lakeshore — that question is stated plainly below, because Amy’s guidance is precisely what answers it.
High School · Grand Haven High School
Key Club — leadership with a record
Key Club carries the ladder into high school: student-led service at full scale — projects planned, budgets handled, events run, officers accountable to members. Grand Haven High School’s Key Club exists today and maintains its own site describing the full Kiwanis family.
In the portfolio pathway, Key Club service becomes the high-school chapter of the record: the project a student led sits beside their Graphics Lab work, their school-store marketing, their internship — one body of evidence, owned by the student, that a college, an employer, or a funder can actually read. And the club gains something in return: members whose work is visible, documented, and worth celebrating.
Adult Life · Tri-Cities
Aktion Club — the ladder doesn’t end at graduation
Aktion Club is the Kiwanis family’s service club for adults with disabilities — and in the Tri-Cities it is led by the very person this page is addressed to. Amy advises the Tri-Cities Aktion Club, whose 2023 video scrapbook earned Honorable Mention among some 500 Aktion Clubs worldwide.
That matters to the pathway’s promise. The portfolio is meant to travel into adult life, not expire at graduation — and Aktion Club is living proof that the Kiwanis ladder keeps going there: service, leadership, and a record of both, for every member of the community.
Builders begin it, Key Club builds it, Aktion Club carries it into adult life — and the portfolio keeps the evidence at every rung.
How the wrap works
Service makes the evidence. The portfolio keeps it. The community sees it.
A club project without a record fades when the school year ends. A portfolio without real-world work is a folder of assignments. Put together, each fixes the other:
The loop
Serve → record → show
A Builders Club garden project, a Key Club fundraiser, an Aktion Club scrapbook — each is done in the community, recorded in the student’s own portfolio with reflection and adult coaching, and shown when it counts: to the school making its case, to the family following along, to the college or employer deciding who this young person is.
For Kiwanis, the return is just as concrete: a generation of members recruited young, trained in service, and visible — the club’s work documented by the students themselves, in their own words and work.
The practical path
What a charter needs — in Amy’s own guidance
None of this requires inventing a process. In November 2025, Amy Urick laid out the chartering requirements for a school club. They are the operating document for this proposal, and they are refreshingly concrete:
Requirement One
A faculty advisor
A teacher or staff member inside the school who sponsors the club — the adult in the building who holds the thread week to week.
Requirement Two
A background-checked Kiwanis advisor
A sponsoring Kiwanis member, background-checked, who connects the school club to the Tri-Cities club — the coaching and continuity Kiwanis brings.
Requirement Three
Eleven or more charter members, including officers
A founding roster of at least eleven students, with officers among them — a club that starts as a real, student-led body, not a sign-up sheet.
Three requirements, all achievable in one school — and the conversation this page asks for is, in large part, Amy’s judgment on where each one stands today.
Open questions, stated plainly
Builders Club at Lakeshore: whether a Builders Club is currently chartered and active at Lakeshore Middle School is not publicly confirmed. This page doesn’t claim one — confirming the status, and what a charter would need if one is due, is a first question for the conversation.
Key Club advising at GHHS: the high school’s Key Club is active, but its faculty advisor is not named on the public pages. Who holds that role today is part of the same conversation.
The invitation widens
Parents and PTO leadership: this wrap needs you in it
A service club runs on more than members. It runs on the adults who drive, chaperone, fundraise, show up — and in a school, those adults are organized in the PTO.
So this invitation is addressed to PTO and parent leadership alongside Kiwanis, deliberately. Parents are the portfolio’s first audience — the people who most want to see what their student is building and becoming — and they are the natural recruiting ground for the advisors, mentors, and sponsors a chartered club needs. A parent who watches a portfolio grow becomes the parent who volunteers to keep it growing.
The district already treats parents as one body: the superintendent has presented to a districtwide PTO gathering (May 2026). This proposal follows that lead — one invitation, to Kiwanis and parent leadership together, rather than two separate asks arriving months apart.
How PTO leaders are reached
The current PTO presidents for Lakeshore Middle School and Grand Haven High School are not publicly listed, and this page invents no names. The route is the ordinary, welcomed one: through the principals’ offices — Principal Brad Cusumano at Lakeshore, 616.850.6500, and Principal Tracy Wilson at Grand Haven High School, 616.850.6071 — whose referrals can carry this invitation to the right parent leaders.
The ask
Nothing to approve today. One conversation.
This package asks three modest things of Kiwanis and parent leadership:
One
An exploratory conversation — Amy first
Not a commitment and not a charter vote: a sit-down to test whether the Kiwanis wrap fits the portfolio pathway, in the judgment of the person who administers these clubs for the Michigan District.
Two
Ground truth on the clubs
Where the Builders Club and Key Club stand today, who advises them, and what Amy’s own charter requirements would need in each building — the facts this page has been careful not to guess.
Three
Consider the parents’ seat at the table
Whether PTO and parent leadership should be in the conversation from the start — as this page proposes — and how best to reach them through the schools.
No pilot is promised here and no funding is claimed; whether the pathway could one day support the district’s case to its funders is an open question that requires further study — a fair subject for the conversation, not a claim in this page.
See it all together
The Wider Circle
This page does not stand alone. These are the companion portfolios the school leaders hold — so Kiwanis leadership can read exactly what the principals and the superintendent received, see what Mary Jane Evink already holds, and follow how the pieces connect.
Explore the connected pathway
The Standard Portfolio Row
1 · Education Pipeline Portfolio
Study this: the full pathway, start to finish — the same portfolio the district's Director of Curriculum is reviewing for curriculum fit right now. If you read one thing, read this.
Open Education Pipeline Portfolio ↗2 · School Ecosystem
Study this: the whole ecosystem on one page — how students, schools, businesses, and the foundation fit together, and where the money flows in a school deployment.
Open School Ecosystem ↗3 · Student Opportunity Briefing
Read this with your student: what your student would actually do — the opportunity, in student language, with the earnings spelled out.
Open Student Opportunity Briefing ↗4 · School Leadership Package
For the leadership conversation: the package prepared for the superintendent and the principals, so parents can see exactly what school leadership was shown — nothing behind a curtain.
Open School Leadership Package ↗5 · Instructor Packet
Study this: how a teacher inside the school takes the story and runs it — the facilitator's packet, because the pathway lives or dies on who teaches it.
Open Instructor Packet ↗6 · Kiwanis Wrap
Do this: walk the ladder — Builders Club, Key Club, affiliates, certification — and see what chartering a Builders Club at Lakeshore would actually require.
Open Kiwanis Wrap ↗7 · OAISD Portfolio
Study this: the career-tech door — what the OAISD and Careerline Tech Center offer students who lean technical, and how it connects to the pathway.
Open OAISD Portfolio ↗8 · Lakeshore Middle School PTO
Explore the PTO's story and the window this rebuild opens onto everything around it.
Open Lakeshore Middle School PTO ↗9 · Spring Lake Portfolio
Study this: the next school walking the same path, in its own colors — including its Work-Based Learning program, where students are already placed with real employers.
Open Spring Lake Portfolio ↗10 · Needs Assessment
Do this: the same short assessment local businesses start with — see the questions a merchant answers before a student ever builds for them.
Open Needs Assessment ↗Michael Rutherford
secondchancepathways.com dba rezconnect.store · Grand Haven, Michigan
Call (616) 805-9710 Email [email protected] Anytime Questions? Call Angie — (616) 612-1774