Nicole Duarte, a junior at Glendale High School, is also the president of the Best Buddies Club. She first joined this club when she was a student at Wilson Middle School.

Nicole is treasurer for the Filipino Club, and she is also serving as treasurer for UNICEF, where her twin sister, Tiffany, serves as president. Last year, Nicole was a contributing member of our Explosion staff, and she has previously served as president of the Coding Club at GHS. If that’s not enough, she was recently selected as one of four GHS students to be an intern at Glendale Adventist Medical Center.

Nicole was also a part of the JV soccer team at GHS, but she couldn’t participate this year, because she is taking three AP classes: AP Biology, AP US History, and AP English Language. Her hobbies include reading fantasy books, watching movies, and spending time with her family. 

Nicole’s dream is to go to UCLA and to become a nurse. “I haven’t decided what type of nurse [I want to be] yet,” she admitted. “I’m either leaning toward nursing the elderly or maybe [become] an emergency nurse.” 

The purpose of the Best Buddies Club is to befriend buddies, the students on our campus who may have intellectual or developmental disabilities. “They are part of our campus,” Nicole said. “But you can see that they don’t interact with other people. I want them to make more friends, so they don’t interact with the same people every day.”

Nicole hopes that the Best Buddies Club helps the buddies to become more social and that they can say hello to different people. “We create a community where we all interact as friends,” she said.

The first few meetings of the Best Buddies Club were all about Round-Up, where club members sold nachos. Nicole wants to make sure that they have enough funds to do everything that they want to accomplish this year. “We did really well,” she explained. “We sold way more than last year.”  

The next thing on the list for Best Buddies Club is field trips. Nicole recalled, “Every time I ask the buddies what they want to do, they always happily say, ‘Field trips! We want to go on field trips!’” But it will probably be some time before they can go on them because Nicole has to ensure her advisors can attend.

If you want to be a member of the Best Buddies Club, meetings are held in Room 6204, twice a month on Wednesdays. Nicole has a lot on her plate this year, but we are so excited to see what she can get done!