Talk about power couples.   Paula Groves Price and Cedric Price channel the energy of 39 teenagers for every waking hour, five June days in a row,  then invite them back to WSU Pullman for another week in August.

The two dynamic directors of the Coeur d’Alene Tribal Leadership Development Camp give much credit to other camp faculty and counselors. It wouldn’t happen without the tribe, which has sponsored the event for six years in a row. The Prices also give high-fives to the teens, who learned a lot about storytelling at the first session of the 2010 camp.  Their biggest assignment: tell a story about yourself with pictures you choose and a script you’ve written and recorded.

In August, the teens will use their storytelling skills on a research project. They’ll interview adults in their community, then analyze why they did, or didn’t, continue their education.  Camp faculty will followup this fall by teaching monthly classes at Plummer’s Lakeside High School. Their audience: ninth graders.  That’s because most kids who drop out of Lakeside have done so after freshman year, says Paula.

In their own audiovisual stories, the leadership campers chronicled the passions and pains of the modern teenager.  Of basketball and buddies, of grownups who let them down and others who hold them up. The backdrop they used was a beautiful Idaho landscape — woods for hunting, rivers for fishing — at the crossroads, it seems, of the whole country.  Teens told of moving in and out of the Coeur d’Alene Reservation from Boston and Los Angeles, from Arizona and Alaska.  Of struggling to adjust to rural life, then missing it.   Most of all, they told about their families.  Dad as best friend. Sister as sidekick.  Grandma who is gone but far from forgotten.

The teens shared their stories with each other and with family members.  The very personal “movies about me” aren’t posted online, but you can read more about them in  WSU Today.