March Issue 2015

Page 1

CHRONICLE the harvard-westlake

Follow the Chronicle @hw_chronicle

Los Angeles • Volume 24 • Issue 6 • March 18, 2015 • hwchronicle.com

After Assault By Marcella Park

For months, she didn’t know anyone else who had gone through what she had. Samantha* was sexually assaulted by an acquaintance at a friend’s house after a party last April, she said. “No,” she had told her attacker during the assault. “I don’t want to, please stop, get off me.” Samantha said she thought “he kind of took it as funny that I was struggling to push him off of me.” She was only able to leave the room “when he was done, when he wanted to stop.” She then rushed to find the two others who were in the house, sleeping in a different room, and told them she wanted to stay with them but did not say why. One of the two friends didn’t find out about the assault until Samantha told her a week later, and the second didn’t know until Samantha spoke about her experience during a school assembly Dec. 3. “I was kind of playing it off because I didn’t want anyone to be worried about me,” Samantha, now 18, said. “I’d never heard of someone else [I knew] having to deal with that. I didn’t know what to do.” Colleges across the nation have come under intense scrutiny this year for their handling of sexual assault cases, but the issue isn’t limited to college campuses. In a Chronicle poll of 432 students at Harvard-Westlake, 10.9 percent said they had been sexually assaulted, 4.9 percent of the males and 17.5 percent of the females. In the past week, at least 11 students from Venice High School were arrested on allegations of sexual assault and lewd acts with minors involving a group of male students conspiring to pressure female victims. The victims and those arrested were all 14 to 17 years old. Most cases of sexual assault never make it to law enforcement. Only one out of about 20 student victims will ever tell an adult, school psychologist Luba Bek said. The day after her assault, Samantha didn’t get out of bed. Her parents sensed something was wrong, but they couldn’t have guessed what had happened, especially because she tried to pretend things were normal. The only person she talked to was a boy she had been dating on-and-off for five years who was not involved in the assault. Otherwise, she isolated herself completely. Two days after the incident, Samantha ran into her attacker again. She made an effort to avoid him after that, but it didn’t help. “It got worse,” Samantha said. “I got more and more upset, and I blamed myself more and couldn’t pay attention at school. If I wasn’t at school, I was in my bed and not speaking to anyone.” She didn’t tell her therapist what had happened until months later. Instead, Samantha went to school every day and “concealed,” she • Continued on page A3

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY JACOB GOODMAN

School mandates daily lunch periods in schedules By Scott Nussbaum

Students will be required to completely block periods four, five, six or seven starting next year in an effort by the school to make sure students will be able to eat lunch during frees in the middle of the day. “Culturally, this signals a shift toward trying to find a new center of balance for students,” Head of School Jeanne Huybrechts said. The change in the scheduling process was discussed within the Faculty Advisory Council, and although it was

not approved by FAC, a majority of faculty and administrators decided to implement the change due to its benefits, Huybrechts said. “There was no approval process per se. The school has decided to attempt to give every student at the school a dedicated midday block of time in order to have lunch and to socialize,” Huybrechts said. With the new online scheduling system, students are allowed to sign up for only seven full classes. Because each student is required to

take five academic classes that meet four times per cycle, students will only be permitted to take elective classes during two periods of the day. The only exceptions to this rule are classes that meet two periods a cycle, Dean Beth Slattery said. Students who have signed up for more than seven classes will have to drop extra classes. Slattery said this only applies to approximately 10 to 15 students so far. “We don’t know how challenging things are going to be,” Slattery said. “We are hopeful because when we did the

simulation of how everything would work if this year the upper school students would have all had to have a lunch period, it actually didn’t negatively impact very many people in terms of having people either drop something or move something around.” Classes that students might have to drop in order to fulfill the midday block requirement include Directed Studies in Italian, German, Greek, Technical Theatre and other classes that do not meet • Continued on page A3

INSIDE C1 HENRY VOGEL/CHRONICLE

BREAK AWAY: The girls’ basketball team advanced to CIF state semifinals to face off against Oaks Christian.


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.
March Issue 2015 by The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle - Issuu