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MUN travels to New York
March 22, 2023
By Georgia Grad
The school’s Model United Nations (MUN) team traveled to New York City to attend the National High School Model United Nations (NHSMUN) conference from March 15-18. The conference put them into committees and assigned a country and debatable topic to solve. MUN Secretary and Treasurer Jake Lancer ’24 said that this conference provided the team with an opportunity to apply the skills they had been working on. “We brought some younger people with us, and they got more opportunities and experience,” Lancer said. “They’ve been practicing a lot, so I was really excited to see them improve because I’ve been invested in their progression over the past couple of months. For myself, just the opportunity to get to go to a big conference was amazing, and I was excited to compete and just try my hardest.” Lancer said that while team members took the conference seriously, it was also an opportunity to spend time together as a group. “It was a travel conference, so we stayed as a team multiple nights, which I think added a greater sense of community,” Lancer said. “We’ve done travel trips, but not cross country.” MUN Vice President Owen Huang ’24 said both returning and new delegates on the team are performing strongly this season. “We’ve had a lot of success this year winning as a delegation at The [University of California, San Diego], the [University of California, Santa Barbara] and Marymount High School,” Huang said. “We’ve also had a good amount of individual awards, and I think that in the last couple of conferences of the year, we’re going to be able to build off of that, which is pretty exciting. One of the main things that we try to do with MUN is just meet new people.” • Continued on hwchronicle.com
DAVIS MARKS/CHRONICLE
COLLABORATING COUNCILS: Prefect Council attended a student government summit with Campbell Hall and Buckley to hear about how other schools run their student councils and honor boards. Members of Campbell Hall’s Honor Board presented on their system and roles.
Prefect Council attends student leadership summit with Campbell Hall and Buckley
By Everett Lakey
Prefect Council met with student leaders from Campbell Hall and The Buckley School on March 9 to discuss their respective student councils and honor boards. Head Prefect Yoshimi Kimura ’23 said the meeting happened after Campbell Hall High School Student Council President Lila McNamee reached out to her and Head Prefect Simon Lee ’23. “The purpose of the summit was to understand what other [independent schools] in the area were doing in terms of student government, especially since the way that their council works are always different than [ours],” Kimura said. “It was a really great chance to not only
learn about other systems but mindful of. On the flip side, I’ve get to meet some of the other noticed throughout the year that student leaders in the area and we haven’t been so great at promake friends and learn from moting school spirit.” each other as best as we could.” Kimura said the meeting was Sophomore Prefect Victor a great opportunity for making Suh ’25 said the meetfriends and understanding was insightful since ing more about how it allowed him to coneach high school and sider the intricacies their student leadof Honor Boards and ership functioned. representative councils. “[I got an] under“The focus of what standing [of] how other each council really depeople view things that I votes their time to is value like DEI efforts or fundamentally a little inclusivity, school spirl. wood bit different,” Suh said. it and topics like that,” Victor “I noticed our school is said Kimura. “It was Suh ’25 much more academicalinteresting to hear othly based, as you might imagine. er student leaders’ perspectives on So the Honor Code holds much those things and how they work at more weight here. Students know their schools. As a school, I think it’s something legitimate [and] it’s always great to build relationsomething that they should be ships with other independent high
schools in the area. Since there’s a lot of fake competition between us where we kind of roast each other, I think it’s nice to come together for the purpose of unity.” McNamee said she feels the event was a success and wants to continue meetings in the future. “Our informal name for this council is the Los Angeles Sister School Committee,” McNamee said. “The group had just been living on a group chat, [so] I wanted to bring that to life and make it a more official event. I really wish Notre Dame had been able to come to it, and I would like to expand more and have all of Buckley because a lot of Buckley was missing. But, I was pleased with how the first round went, and I’d love to see more collaboration in the future.” • Continued on hwchronicle.com
Former advisor publishes book
By Mejo Liao
Former Chronicle Advisor Kathleen Neumeyer published her book “Advising the Chronicle: How I taught high school journalism students to run billion-dollar companies (and you can too).” Neumeyer was the Communications Department Head for 24 years, overseeing 192 issues of The Chronicle. Neumeyer said she wrote the book to share how high school journalism affected the careers of her former students after reading an article by Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff ’93 (Sophia ’23, Luke ’27). “My book was inspired by a column written by [Rascoff] who was the co-editor of the Chronicle my first year as the full time advisor, 1992 to 1993,” Neumeyer said. “He wrote a column on fortune. com on Sept. 1, 2015, with the headline ‘My High School Journalism Teacher Taught Me How to Run Billion-Dollar Companies.’ His point was that
high school journalism prepares students for almost any career they decide to pursue, not just in journalism.” Rascoff said he is honored to have inspired Neumeyer’s book. “It is humbling to think that I was able to play a role in inspiring [Neumeyer] to write a book about her experience at Harvard-Westlake because she was such an instrumental teacher and mentor to me,” Rascoff said. “To think that the roles are now somehow reversed, that I have helped return the favor by inspiring her in this stage of her career, is incredibly rewarding.” Neumeyer said she proceeded to interview students to understand how high school journalism affected their future careers, especially those that are not journalism-centered. “I interviewed more than 50 former students and asked them if there was anything they learned in high school journalism that they still use,” Neumeyer said. “They outlined for me all the ways The
Chronicle prepared them to design theme parks and video games, to program streaming services, to run school districts and major sports enterprises, to practice law and medicine and nonprofits. A former student who is a rabbi said that what he learned from journalism is the most important of his rabbinic skill set.” Rascoff said he hopes that educators and coaches alike reading Neumeyer’s book will learn from her example and teach the next successful students. “[Neumeyer] was a phenomenal teacher and treated her students with enormous maturity,” Rascoff said. “She was one of the first adults that I remember treating me like an adult even though I was still a student, and the trust that she placed in all of us inspired her students to rise to the occasion. Hopefully, other educators will read [Neumeyer’s] book and become even better instructors, mentors and coaches to generations of future students.”
PRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF KATHLEEN NEUMEYER