On Saturday, scores of Clearwater teenagers will converge on the Sheraton Sand Key to build sand castles and play Ultimate Frisbee. No, they're not on spring break. After a few hours of fun (to grease the wheels of teenage collaboration), up to 100 local high school students will sit down to trickier business: planning the future of a youth- and family-friendly downtown Clearwater.

The daylong summit, called Rediscovering Clearwater, aims to engage 8th to 12th-graders in long-term activism at the intersection of leadership, design and local government. The summit, in turn, is part of a larger program called GotGov, the brainchild of politicians and city officials who realized long ago that the city of Clearwater — exemplified by its downtown core — has no future if it can't retain its younger residents and attract new ones.

"If there's not enough exciting things [downtown] to draw in families, the town will just age more and more. Unfortunately, that leads to culture death. We don't have culture death right now — we just have no culture," says Jesse Sherman.

Sherman, 17, is one of the founding members of GotGov. The Calvary Christian High School senior has been active in the program since the end of his freshman year, when a school administrator recommended him in response to a city call for student candidates. Despite his terse assessment of the current state of downtown, Sherman remains a big fan of Clearwater, saying he hopes to return after attending the University of Florida.

Initially, the city modeled GotGov on its popular "citizens academy" for adults; the high-schoolers took tours of local government facilities to learn about City Council, finance and waste treatment, among other topics. But officials in charge of the program decided that tours and demonstrations weren't giving the students the sense of ownership that would inspire them to become activists.

"They didn't have anything to hang their hats on," says Clearwater Public Communications Director Doug Matthews, who oversees the program.

Quickly adopting a new approach, officials asked the students to redefine the program and create a new event. Last year, the youth leadership summit was born. The one-day meeting is a better fit for the over-booked schedules of high-achieving students like Sherman, who will take part in a weeklong regional competition for track and field athletes before heading to the summit on Saturday. And the summit's interactive, urban planning approach taps into the Internet generation's expectations of customizing and co-creating their products and environments — even the cities they live in.

So what will the youth-friendly future of downtown Clearwater look like?

"We've heard them say that they'd like a movie theater, but nothing's off limits in the conversation. It may be something as simple as a fishing pier, and it might be something as complex as a monorail to the beach," Matthews says.

Sherman and the other members of GotGov's core group of planners (about 15 of the 90-100 students expected at the conference) have already identified a few priorities for the summit's afternoon visioning exercise: encouraging growth of the arts downtown, cleaning up eyesores and creating new venues for dining and entertainment. Sherman praises downtown Dunedin for its simultaneously urban-and-rural atmosphere and says downtown St. Petersburg and Tampa both have a distinctive character that Clearwater lacks. But the city is trying, he says, working hard to redevelop the Cleveland Street District, for example.

During the summit, the students will develop a plan to implement at least one of the downtown improvements on their wish list in the next two months with the help of city government. And the ideas they generate during the visioning exercise with a scope of 10-20 years from now, no matter how pie-in-the-sky, will go to the city's downtown development board for serious consideration. Because one thing the Rediscovering Clearwater summit won't include is a bunch of adults telling the students it can't be done.

"When you've got a group of kids energetic and talking about these far-fetched ideas, that's the last thing you want," Matthews says.

For more information about Rediscovering Clearwater and GotGov, go to myclearwater.com/gotgov.

For more info on Creative Loafing's Fix It Now project, go to fixitnowtampabay.com.

This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2008.