Westridge is thrilled to announce the appointments of two, director-level administrators as part of the implementation of the 2020-2025 Westridge Strategic Plan. Ian Tatum will join us as director of equity, leading our school-wide diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. James Evans will join us as director of teaching and learning.

The Westridge Speech and Debate Team has now been competing in online tournaments for more than a year, and the team has met the challenge with great success! They have taken advantage of the opportunity to virtually compete in out-of-state tournaments they wouldn’t normally participate in and proved that they hold their own against competitors across the country.

Yesterday, Upper School students welcomed LaRae Cantley, co-founder of the Housing Justice-LA podcast, to speak at their Upper School Town Meeting on the topic of homelessness.

Next month, the Westridge Theatre Department will present its spring production, Eden Experiments, which was written, designed, and scored by students in a collaborative creative process unlike anything Westridge has done before.

When you hear the words “vocabulary quiz,” you probably don’t think of visual art pieces, songs, or poetry. But those were just a few of the creative responses that resulted from the most recent vocabulary quiz in John Cross’s 7^th grade English class.

After studying the Codex Medoza, a document created in the mid-1500s to document the society of the Aztec Empire before the Spanish conquest, 5th and 6th grade Spanish students stepped into the shoes of Mexica high priestesses to create their own historically accurate strips of codex.

Since January, Upper School Chamber Orchestra students have been creating their own music history podcast episodes uncovering the musical contributions of minority people, communities, and cultures. Their 15-minute episodes will air on the new Westridge radio station KWST.

After starting on-campus athletic conditioning earlier in the month, we welcomed our first groups of students back to the Westridge campus on Wednesday for small-group social emotional learning gatherings!

In honor of Lunar New Year, 8th grade Mandarin students crafted miniature lion or dragon heads this week, using recycled materials and basing their design choices on research into Chinese culture.

In a follow-up to our October student assemblies on microaggressions (which covered what microaggressions are and how they affect our community), Director of Lower & Middle School Dr. Zanita Kelly and facilitator and culturally responsive teaching expert Ian Tatum led another series of assemblies on how to respond to and disrupt microaggressions in the moment they occur.

As we continue our work to expand the voices and perspectives in our curriculum, we asked our teachers how they are recognizing Black History Month in the classroom. Classes from grades 4 to 12 and from the arts to math have linked curriculum to the observance of the month. In addition, many faculty members commented that their work this month is part of a year- or semester-long approach.

In lieu of the traditional dragon and lion dances Lower School students perform annually for Lunar New Year, this year the Student Activities & Leadership Council (SALC) joined forces with Middle Schoolers to host an all-school assembly on the origins and traditions of the holiday.

In a year that is breaking many college admissions norms in terms of volume of applications and changes to requirements due to impacts of COVID-19 on the Class of 2021, 76% of the Westridge senior class has received at least one acceptance to date.