[Sorry, I didn’t see your post until today – slipped past me for some reason.]
An award from 9th grade wouldn’t normally have the weight of one from closer to graduation, but it’s still something worth listing.
How can leadership potential be a theme in the application? Would you like to give more explanation? < You can write for example about what you’ve done in the past, and how it ties in to your plans for the future. I just wanted to alert you as to how that would make sense for a potential topic/theme, but I don’t want to give you any guidance beyond that. Brown already heard from me 45 years ago as to what was in my head. Now it’s time for them (or whoever) to hear what’s in yours. If “leadership” doesn’t resonate, then by all means pick something else.
One thing which probably gets too much emphasis in the college advice business is “where to go to college”, at least in terms of how that relates to employment afterwards. As others here have indicated, and you really need to take to heart, where to go starts with “someplace which will take me for sure and that I can come up with the money for somehow”. That’s pretty straightforward in populated areas of the US, since we have good 2-year (or “community”) colleges which can serve as a bridge to a 4-year. I took all the Calculus I needed for an Engineering degree at Brown at a CC, before I got to Providence. Same math either way.
After you graduate from college and start working, it probably won’t matter a whole lot where you went to college anyway. My boss didn’t care about Ivy League or State U. Just that I would put in the work to learn the job and become a productive employee. You can position yourself for that at an Ivy, or just about anywhere.