Students and Faculty Attend NAIS Conferences in Indianapolis

Three Westminster faculty members and five students traveled to Indianapolis Dec. 4 through Dec. 6 to participate in annual conferences hosted by the National Association of Independent Schools.

 

Katherine Eckerson ’17, Alexa Green ’17, Joel Groves ’17, Jeremy Mason ’16 and Shanntal Morel ’17 attended the 21st NAIS Student Diversity Leadership Conference (SDLC), ​a multiracial gathering of high school students from around the country. Through sessions led by adults and peer facilitators, more than 1600 student delegates focused on self-reflection, ally-ship and community. They also practiced expression and learned communication strategies that will benefit their school.

 

Simultaneously, Assistant Headmaster Kathleen Devaney, Dean of Students Lee Huguley and Director of Multicultural Affairs Lisa McGrath participated in the 27th annual NAIS People of Color Conference (PoCC), attending workshops that ranged from “What I Said and What I Meant: Cross Cultural Communication” to “You Have Two Moms? How Can That Be?” Keynote speakers included Michael Eric Dyson, a public intellectual, NPR radio show host and best-sell​ing author hailed as one of the nation’s most inspiring African Americans; Maysoon Zayid, one of America’s first Muslim women comedians and the first person to perform standup in Palestine and Jordan; Cheryl Brook Henderson, the daughter of the late Reverend Oliver L. Brown who, along with 12 other parents and the NAACP, filed the historic Brown v. Board of Education; and Jose Antonio Vargas, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who outed himself as an undocumented immigrant in an essay published in the The New York Times Magazine in 2011.