Silver Bay Sixth-Grader Wins Statewide Mayor for a Day Essay Contest

Everlie Ernest didn't write about infrastructure bonds or municipal zoning when she imagined herself as Silver Bay's mayor. She wrote about $4 homemade cookies, a monthly garbage pick-up, and a trip to Zups to buy food for neighbors in need. That plan, submitted to the League of Minnesota Cities' "Mayor for a Day" essay contest, earned the sixth-grader at William Kelley School one of the statewide prizes for 2025: a $100 award and publication in the league's Minnesota Cities magazine.

Mayor Wade LeBlanc visited Everlie's classroom in Mary Nieters' sixth-grade class on March 25 to deliver the news in person. He brought cookies.

In her winning essay, Everlie outlined a two-part agenda: organize a monthly community clean-up day to keep Silver Bay tidy, then launch a fundraiser anchored by her grandmother's baked goods, priced at $4 each "because they're homemade (with love)." Once the fundraiser raised enough money, she wrote, she'd head to Zups or Costco for bulk food to distribute to people in need.

The Zups reference matters. Invoking Silver Bay's own grocery store, not a generic chain, signals a kid who thinks about her town in practical terms rather than civics-class abstractions.

The League of Minnesota Cities has run the "Mayor for a Day" contest since 2013, inviting fourth, fifth, and sixth graders across Minnesota to answer a single question: "What would you do if you were mayor for a day?" Everlie was one of the statewide winners for 2025, selected alongside students from Minnetrista, Woodbury, and St. James. Silver Bay had at least two strong sixth-grade entries this year. Essays run 125 to 300 words.

Whether the city could act on either of Everlie's proposals is a legitimate question. A monthly community clean-up would require public works coordination, volunteer outreach, and likely some city funding, not a trivial ask for a city that proposed a 40 percent levy increase to its Street Fund for 2025 while absorbing the loss of Taconite Production Tax revenue. A food fundraiser for residents in need would require partnership with existing social services, though Silver Bay has demonstrated recent capacity for leveraging matching-fund programs through Lake County HRA, which turned $20,000 in city investment into $65,121 in improvements to homes and businesses in 2025.

Neither idea is structurally complicated. Both are the kind of ground-level civic initiatives a city council could pilot cheaply with the right community partners. The question of whether either one finds its way into Silver Bay's 2026 programming is one for Mayor LeBlanc and the city administrator to answer publicly. For now, the mayor's response was to show up at school with celebratory cookies.

Everlie's essay will be published in Minnesota Cities magazine, which circulates to city officials and administrators across the state. A sixth-grader's plan to feed Silver Bay's neighbors with her grandmother's baked goods will reach an audience of professionals who spend careers trying to accomplish the same goal with far more complicated tools.