Meredith Hawkins was young when she realized that some words can hurt.

As a seventh-grader at Harrison Middle School in Yarmouth, she launched a campaign, “Spread the Word to End the Word,” to stop the derogatory use of “retard” and “retarded” in the town’s schools.

“It was especially prevalent when I was in seventh grade,” Hawkins recalled. “It was used a lot, often without any intention to hurt people, but it really does offend some people.”

Hawkins displayed a campaign banner in the middle school hallway and asked students to sign a pledge to remove the R-word from their vocabulary. Students embraced the effort, and it became a yearly effort among seventh-graders.

In eighth grade, Hawkins started the annual Young Athletes Festival, a program for kids ages 2 to 7 that helps them develop motor skills and introduces them to competitive play. While it aims to prepare children for the Special Olympics, it’s open to children with or without intellectual disabilities.

At Yarmouth High School, she started the Youth Activation Council, a club including students with special needs that works on education and acceptance of people’s differences. She and another student started a lunch buddy program, which partners upperclassmen with students with special needs who often end up sitting alone.

And she helped to start a “unified” basketball team at the high school to participate in the interscholastic program co-sponsored by Special Olympics and the Maine Principals’ Association. Unified teams include students with developmental disabilities and nonvarsity students without disabilities.

Hawkins was a three-sport athlete at Yarmouth High who speaks Spanish and graduated magna cum laude. She plans to study international relations at Boston College, with a possible minor in social work and psychology. She hopes to further interests she developed on service trips to Ghana in Africa with her mother’s Yale University alumni group, and to Nicaragua in Central America and Appalachia in West Virginia with her church youth group.

She credits her parents, Eileen, a nurse practitioner, and Craig, a surgeon, with showing her how to live fully and help others. “My parents have always allowed me to explore a lot of different opportunities and do whatever I’m interested in,” Hawkins said. “They’re extremely hard-working, but they’re also amazing human beings.”

– By Kelley Bouchard