Caitlyn Van Hoose (12) makes her way to school in the morning with one word on her mind: impact. If she is not leading a Peer Assistant Leaders (PALs) activity during lunch as the vice president, she is memorizing the constitution for mock trial, leading the hip-hop team to another nationals victory as team captain or stopping by one of five dance studios to drop off donated dance wear for her non-profit, The Pirouette Project.

“There’s 24 hours in a day, and I love to sleep,” Van Hoose said. “I say I sleep for eight hours, and every single other hour of the day will be used to make impact. At the end of the day, there’s so much more that you can do with your time. Time is limited, our lives are very short, so we need to make as much impact now in the moment as possible.”

Van Hoose’s involvement and productivity is in an effort to help others. She can be found in room nine, the PALs room.

“I think just the amount of people’s lives that we get to improve is really near and dear to my heart,” Van Hoose said. “I really enjoy seeing people smile. And I think a lot of the people that come to PALs events, and a lot of the people that we do outreach for and, try and connect with, are the people that need it the most. So just being there and helping them … is [whats] important to me.”

Van Hoose’s uses her voice to reach people in the PALs room and on campus.  

“Speaking at the suicide prevention walk this year, there was a crowd of about 100 people, a lot of students from the school who this resonated very personally with,” Van Hoose said. “Just speaking about the suicide prevention topic, it was really impactful to me. And the way that [PALs uses] it is very impactful to other people, and also to the way that we portray ourselves as a class.”

PALs advisor, honors chemistry and Advanced Placement chemistry teacher Angela Willden described Van Hoose’s ability to see “the whole big picture.”

“She sees the vision that she wants, the overall experience, not just the little pieces,” Willden said. “She’s really good at helping people manage their tasks, and giving people time to come up with their own ideas.”

Van Hoose’s “big picture” continues to grow as she increases PALs’ impact with her outreach position.

“She’s also doing a great job with philanthropy this year,” Willden said. “One of the things that PALs has really wanted to do is expand philanthropy, and we did some of that last year, but she’s also kind of coordinating a lot of that in her outreach committee.”

Van Hoose can also be found across campus in the dance room, where she is captain of the varsity hip-hop team. 

“I started dancing when I was two years old,” Van Hoose said. “I remember my mom … always tells me how I only wanted tutus when I was little and had every color tutu when I was two, and I [would always ask], ‘please let me go to dance class.’ So she put me in with my cousin and my neighbor, and we started dancing all together.” 

Van Hoose sets clear goals for her team to ensure everyone is on the same page.

“My goal as a captain is to make sure I have a really good relationship with everyone on my team, that I’m both respected and that I’m friendly with everyone,” Van Hoose said. “Because I know that when I have to be the person that delivers the hard news to the team that something is being done wrong or there’s some drama that needs to be squashed, I need to be respected. But also, I love every single person on my team so very dearly.” 

She led the team to win the large hip-hop category last year for the first time in 15 years.

“It was such a great experience,” Van Hoose said. “We really worked hard to do a lot of team bonding and team connection, and really make sure that all of us had the same goals going into the season. We were there to win, and we were there to do it the best, and that even winning at a regional competition in San Diego against just 10 teams wasn’t enough. We needed to win against all 70 at the national competition, and we did, and it was just amazing.”

Van Hoose collaborates with other dance captains including Madison Hall (12), captain of the varsity contemporary dance team, who praised her drive. 

“She really takes initiative, and she really focuses on issues that people just don’t,” Hall said. “She is just a problem solver. And it’s really, really, really nice having her as a captain, because she just gets stuff done.”

Many of Van Hoose’s traits and qualities come from her other extracurriculars.

“She’s very outgoing, and she’s not afraid to speak up when things go wrong, or if she feels like someone is maybe not feeling their best that day,” Hall said. “She’s also on PALs, so she just understands that type of emotional aspect of dance, too, and how some people might just need a lift up, and how we just might need a pep talk before we dance and before comp and stuff.”

Katie Wheeler (10), a member of the varsity hip-hop team, described Van Hoose as a “really great friend” who “knows how to help you.”

“She has inspired us to work hard, and she is a very encouraging person who helps bond us all as a team,” Wheeler said.

Van Hoose emphasized the importance of building concrete relationships and upholding the team’s bond, as well as exploring dance as a creative art.

“Being able to communicate with a large group of people is really important,” Van Hoose said. “As well as learning how to be respectful as a leader, [it is] very important. Also I just love dance, creatively. I think it’s very important. It requires a lot of creative thinking”

Van Hoose expanded her passion for the creative arts and dance beyond the barre and stage; she founded the non-profit organization, the Pirouette Project, to sustainably reuse costumes and return them to the dance community. 

“The Pirouette Project is a nonprofit organization in California, and we are incorporated, which means that we are an official organization,” Van Hoose said. “I started working on it near the beginning of 2024, and I identified a problem in our community of dancers in San Diego, that there’s a lot of costumes that we use for recitals and dance competitions that are very expensive and only are used once for a dance competition, maybe two or three times, but then after that, they get either repurposed within a family, or they just get thrown away.”

Van Hoose works with six dance studios in the San Diego area, by placing donation bins in lobbies and then redistributing the costumes and clothes around the area. Currently, Van Hoose is expanding her organization beyond the San Diego bubble.

“We take the single use costumes and redistribute them to dance studios and orphanages and schools in Latin America that need clothes, dance costumes, dance shoes and anything like that,” Van Hoose said.

According to the nonprofit’s website, it reaches locations including “preschools in Hawaii, orphanages, community centers and dance studios in Mexico, and, eventually, expanding to third world countries in other continents as we connect with organizations in Africa.”

All of Van Hoose’s ventures are built on passion. As she completes her final stretch of high school, she is already considering the next stage of her academic and professional path.

“I want to go into law, first of all, and do something that has to do with human rights,” Van Hoose said. “Definitely working for NGOs and community service organizations like nonprofits, is the goal, at the end of the day, doing legal work for them and just trying to make sure that as many people are being served by the government as possible, because that’s really what I’m passionate about.”

Through dedication and leadership, Van Hoose spent her high school years addressing important issues and bringing her peers together.

“At the end of the day, everything’s temporary, and we should be grateful for every opportunity we get, even if it’s a hard one and it requires a lot of work,” Van Hoose said.