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Around Campus
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Class of 2027
Class of 2025
Congratulations to the Classes of 2027 and 2025!
Last spring's 6th and 8th grade recognition ceremonies moved back to campus after a year hiatus! Students and families gathered on Herrick Quad (a location shift made to meet distancing requirements) for remarks from Head of School Elizabeth J. McGregor, Director of Lower and Middle School Dr. Zanita Kelly, and their class presidents, Alice L. ’27, Ella B. ’25, and Tanvi C. ’25, before receiving certificates.
Raven-Symoné Shares Wisdom with the Class of 2021
This year’s commencement speaker, director and entertainer Raven-Symoné, gave a spirited and thoughtful address on the theme of cultivating and honoring your internal voice. In telling the story of her own evolution from feeling on autopilot in her career to being aware and honoring her own thoughts, Raven told the graduates that by “asking big questions and pushing boundaries set by others we are able to change our circumstances.” Raven-Symoné is a fourtime NAACP Image Award-winning and Emmy-nominated actor and producer, currently reprising her role of Raven Baxter from “That’s So Raven” in the Disney Channel series “Raven’s Home.”
Love Your Body Week: Effects of the Pandemic on Body Image
The student support group Peer-to-Peer hosted its annual Love Your Body Week in February, with a special focus on how the pandemic and remote learning impacted students' body image. The week’s virtual events included an Upper School Town Meeting, an all-school Big & Little Sister self-portrait activity, and optional lunchtime meetups. Among the questions posed by Peer-to-Peer student leaders were: “How have coronavirus and online learning impacted your relationship with your body?,” “What strategies do you use to feel comfortable and confident with your body?,” and “How do you take care of your physical health while isolated?”
Tiger Week: At-Home, Experiential Learning in Lieu of Interim
Westridge hosted “Tiger Week” the week before spring break, offering students nearly 60 virtual workshops exploring a wildly diverse range of non-academic topics. Tiger Week took the place of the traditional Interim, Discovery, and Experiential Weeks, which were not possible this spring due to the pandemic. Westridge faculty and staff members proposed workshops for Tiger Week based on their personal interests, resulting in workshops that ran the gamut from dog photography, woodworking, web game design, and music journalism to sewing, creating Dutch still lifes and “The Politics of Self-Care: Learning from Audre Lorde.”
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Congratulations to Jennifer Spinoglio ’21 and Simone Kang ’21, who were among just 7,500 students across the nation to receive 2021 National Merit Scholarships funded by the colleges and universities that they will attend. To qualify as semifinalists for the scholarship, these students scored among the top 16,000 out of 1.5 million juniors who took the PSAT. Finalists were later selected based on applications that detailed their academic excellence and demonstrated participation and leadership in school and community activities. Congratulations to our other semifinalists from the Class of 2021: Mirelle Lindquist, Maya Melnik, Katherine Mrozek, and Jiatong Zhang.
Photo courtesy of the Partnership for Success! Facebook page
PfS! Mentorship Program Launches with 50 Westridge Mentors
The first Partnership for Success! (PfS!) Westridge student mentorship program launched in the summer of 2020, with more than 50 Westridge Upper School students serving as mentors to 5th and 6th grade PfS! students throughout the school year. Westridge students formed connections with their mentees by meeting virtually up to once a week to provide tutoring and social emotional activities like virtual book clubs, Mad Libs, science experiments, baking, and more. This program added a year-round component to PfS!, a collaboration between four Pasadena independent schools and the city’s public school district to support students from local elementary schools who would otherwise have limited access to summer academic enrichment. Simone Kang Jennifer Spinoglio
Spring Play Created through New Student-Led Collaboration
The Westridge Theatre Department’s spring production Eden Experiments was created wholly by students in a “devised theatre” process that began with no script and no auditions—just a signup sheet. All Upper School students could choose to help write the script, compose music, perform, or design scenery, costumes, makeup, sound, or lighting. The student creators embraced their virtual platform and wrote a play about a reality TV show, entitled Eden Experiments, that follows six teenagers who were raised in isolation as part of a social experiment to scientifically resolve the question “are humans innately good or bad?”
KWST Student-Run Radio Station Launched
In January, the new student-run Westridge radio station KWST officially launched! Gigi T. ’22 was the force behind KWST and hosted the station’s first show, Sound in Space —a radio show that places a music playlist in a particular space, time, and weather condition, such as “89° in LA.” KWST is broadcast on Mixlr, an app that offers a chat box that enables students to interact with each other (and the host) during live broadcasts. By the end of the school year, KWST had grown to include four weekly radio shows including talk shows and music shows. Check it out at mixlr.com/kwst.
ASB Launches Studentto-Student Pen Pal Program
During the past year, student leaders were invaluable in bringing forth ideas to address the changing needs of their peers throughout the pandemic. Among the most creative was the Associated Student Body’s (ASB) school-wide pen pal program, designed to give students a chance to make meaningful connections with peers in other grades while getting a much-needed break from their computer screens. More than 40 students from all divisions signed up to be paired with a random pen pal, providing an opportunity for inter-divisional connection that was hard to come by in the remote learning setting last year.
Congratulations!
Congratulations to the varsity golf and tennis teams, which were both undefeated this season and won the Prep League Championships. Varsity golf went on to place 6th at CIF-SS Division 3 Team Championships in June—the first time in Westridge history that the team has placed in the top 10 in the division!
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Coding & Game Design Students Study Gender and Racial Bias in AI and STEM Fields
In a brand-new Coding & Game Design unit, 7th and 8th graders discussed “algorithmic bias,” or the ways in which computer algorithms can lead to unfair outcomes and give privileges to one group of users over another. The class was rooted in the work of the Gender Shades project, created by M.I.T. Media Lab computer scientist Joy Buolamwini, a Black woman, when she discovered that her face was going repeatedly undetected by facial recognition software—until she put on a white mask. Students discussed the “coded gaze,” a term for algorithmic bias coined by Buolamwini, and how it might appear in technology they use daily such as social media apps, AI such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, and more. To help students understand the real-world implications of this issue, a panel of female computer scientists led by Westridge alumna Taylor Daughtery ’08 (pictured top left), a senior iOS software engineer at Headspace, visited the class to discuss their experiences working in technology.
Four Students Graduate with New Global Initiative Program Distinctions
Four members of the Class of 2021 became the first alumnae to graduate with distinctions from the Westridge Global Initiative program. Congratulations to the following students who earned the Global Initiative Distinction by creating their own independent interdisciplinary study of a modern-day global issue:
NATALIE CHEN for her work on immigration along the MexicoAmerica border
SOSI DAY for her work on the repercussions of low-quality childcare in the United States
LEILY ROSSI for her work on the modern pollical landscape of the Dominican Republic and Haiti
QUINTYNN VAUGHN for her work on death penalty laws and crime rates in countries around the globe.
How Did Science Labs Work While Remote? At Westridge, Remarkably Well!
Through a combination of serious supply pickups, materials commonly found at home, and impressive online lab simulations, Westridge teachers kept science learning an active endeavor for students last year.
In Lower School classes, teachers sent home a full semester of supplies for lab activities. Sixth graders created air trolleys that sailed across fishing line in their engineering unit and built solar ovens to cook s’mores when studying heat transfer, and 5th graders grew wheat seeds to learn about photosynthesis and modeled the phases of the moon using Oreo cookies.
In Middle School classes, students completed hands-on labs using items found at home to extract DNA from a strawberry, culture bacteria in Petri dishes, and model osmosis using an egg.
In addition to hands-on labs, Upper School chemistry, biology, and anatomy classes made the most of simulated labs that provided interactive animations of what students would traditionally do in the lab. For example, chemistry students used their cursors to fill pipettes, while 9th grade biology students were able to dissect frogs virtually.
Chamber Orchestra Podcast Spotlights the Music History of the Underrepresented
The Upper School Chamber Orchestra created a music history podcast this spring entitled “Crescendo: Amplifying Global Voices.” Each student created an episode exploring the musical contributions of an underrepresented group, such as female composers and minority people, communities, and cultures. Subjects explored included: how female composer Maddalena Casulana challenged social norms and influenced the Renaissance, LGBTQ+ composers in the Classical Era, the impact, meanings, and misinterpretations of the American Indian Ghost Dance of 1890, and how new girl groups are redefining womanhood in KPop. You can listen to all the podcasts online at https://westridgecrescendopodcast.weebly.com/.
