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The Lowndes County Childrens Policy Council has announced Randall Caldwell as the October recipient of the Character in Action award.

Nicholas Townsend, principal of The Calhoun School, said Caldwell was nominated for the award as a result of his exponential growth through adversity.

“I do not know where to begin when attempting to explain this young man’s journey,” Twonsend said. “I was first introduced to Randall Caldwell, my Character In Action candidate, last year as he attended The Calhoun School in-school suspension program for a majority of the year. Randall was placed in our overage academy as he began to fall behind in his academics at his middle school.” 

According to Townsend, Caldwell was a shy young man that refused to speak much due to his speech impediment but with the assistance of the school’s in-school suspension director, Nickles Rankins, Randall was able to catch up with his middle school work and get back on track with his 9th grade work. 

Townsend said that as Caldwell’s grades improved, he also began to let his personality shine through as he joined in extracurricular activities and socialized with his peers. 

“Randall is a big, intimidating young man in stature but his personality is that of a harmless teddy bear; this is where he earned his nick-name, ‘Gummi,’” Townsend said. “Randall has a smile that will light up a room and continues to break out of his shell as he is now a 10th grader that was elected to the homecoming court this year and continues to be a force on the Tiger football team!”

Through dedication to improving his grades and with the help of school staff, Caldwell now boasts a 3.66 grade point average and has blossomed into a “social butterfly” as Townsend quoted. 

According to District Judge Adrian Johnson, the award was created as a way to highlight the positive accomplishments made by Lowndes County Students.

“We got to thinking that we needed to do something to highlight the positive accomplishments of our students that are doing good things,” Johnson said. “All we hear about on the news is all the negative things about how bad children are these days, but we knew that there were outstanding children in our community doing wonderful things and we wanted to start a program to highlight their positive accomplishments.”