This article is part of a series of profiles of 2024 graduating seniors in Salem high schools that will be published over the coming week.
A broken elevator at prom was no match for Dayanara Merchant-Trejo.
The West Salem High School senior spent hours carrying furniture up four flights of stairs at Willamette Heritage Center to ready the historic event space for prom — one of the many duties of student government leaders putting on some of the school’s biggest events.
“We were taking up these big sofas and walking them up and down. The big flower wall, up and down. I don’t really want to think about how the DJ got up there,” she said.
Merchant-Trejo, 18, has spent much of her time at West Salem High School working behind the scenes to make sure dances have decorations, homecoming assemblies run smoothly and charity drives are organized.
As West’s student body president, she’s sometimes in the school gym until close to midnight setting up for an assembly the next day.
“Dani is involved, it feels like, in everything,” said health sciences teacher Janet Vandiver.
That’s included organizing blood drives and donating during them. Once, she showed up at school in the pouring rain to load her truck with garbage bags full of shoes that leadership students collected for Salem’s annual One Thousand Soles drive.
“We were absolutely soaked,” she said, laughing at the memory of dropping off shoes at Ike Box.
She’s also helped organize other community service projects, like putting together food baskets for West families in need over the holidays.
“We’re dragging these bags and these boxes of food out and every family that came by, they were just like, ‘Thank you so much,’” she said. “Just seeing the community and everything, it just felt more real … You can be behind a project and you don’t actually get to see the outcome. But when you see the outcome, it’s like wow … you played a part in all this.”
Merchant-Trejo also worked in West’s peer mentoring program, which sends students to Walker and Straub middle schools to work one on one with students.
“There was a lot of issues at home, and I think I enjoyed being able to help them either with schoolwork or if they just really needed to talk to me too. It was being like an older sister,” she said.
The program originally only mentored Straub students, but at Merchant-Trejo’s suggestion, it was expanded to Walker last year and now serves both middle schools in west Salem.
The experience mentoring informed her plans after high school. Merchant-Trejo plans to study psychology at the University of Portland and wants to become a marriage and family therapist. She said while she enjoyed working with students, she has an easier time building rapport with adults and has seen how unresolved family issues impact kids.
“I love working with them. But I also know that I don’t think that I can be exactly what they need me to be. But I would like to be that for adults,” she said.
The Optimist Club of Salem honored Merchant-Trejo this year with their Most Involved in Community Service award. She was one of three West students honored.
“She has really great qualities of being present all the time, communicating well, and definitely if there’s a need, volunteering, whatever, I feel like she’s always open to help anybody,” Vandiver said.
Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
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Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers city news, education, nonprofits and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for a decade. Outside of work, she’s a skater and board member with Salem’s Cherry City Roller Derby and can often be found with her nose buried in a book.
