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Westminster Christian School senior James Lee is the school’s Silver Knight nominee in the General Scholarship category. He’s also founder and president of Westminster Vision, a non-profit organization that collects new and gently used eyeglasses and donates them to those in need.
“We’ve done donations locally as well as internationally,” he says.
The organization has participated in three international donations to London, Mexico and Nicaragua. They also donated eyeglasses to five senior living homes in Miami – the Palace Royale, the Palace Suites, Residential Plaza Blue Lagoon, the Palace Renaissance, and the Palace Nursing Home and Rehab.
“Some of my members and I ran a glasses drive this summer,” he says. “We received some donations from the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute.”
His motivation to create the organization was his mom.
“Both of my parents are doctors,” he says. “My mom is an ocular plastic surgeon. “She works at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute. All my whole life I’ve been exposed to those with visual impairment.”
His community service works include spending more than100 hours working in the social services department at Bascom Palmer.
That summer he filed paperwork for underprivileged patients who did not have insurance.
He also transported visually impaired patients around the hospital.
“I would also shadow the dynamics in the ER and how they talked some of the patients,” he says. “I watched how they would use Spanish to help talk to the patients.”
During that summer, he enjoyed talking to the elderly people he was transporting.
“They would tell me stories,” he says.
Lee also met a lot of his mom’s colleagues.
“It gave me insight as to what I might want to do in the future,” he says.
This past summer, Lee participated in a medical mission trip to Mexico and donated some eyeglasses.
“I worked with the Hawaiian Eye Foundation, which does medical mission trips to various countries,” Lee says.
While there, he measured patient’s visual acuity using the classic letter chart so as to assess the extent to which they could see.
What he learned on the trip helped guide him toward his potential major.
“It directed me toward policy type of issues rather than surgery,” he says.
Lee has two publications in academic journals.
“One of the papers was on research concerning skin antiseptics,” he says. “We looked at bacteria killing agents for surgical applications.”
A paper on COVID 19 was part of his Advanced Placement Capstone Research class. “It was a comparative case study on COVID 19 prevention methods,” he says. “I investigated Florida and California.”
He analyzed the states in terms of different variables, including mortality, morbidity, the economy in terms of the real GDP and unemployment rate and psychological effect, reported cases of anxiety and depression.
In college, he plans to major in Global Health and Public Policy. He’s been accepted to Notre Dame, Loyola Marymount, University of Miami, Pepperdine, Cornell University, the University of Florida, Florida State University, the University of California at Santa Barbara and University of California San Diego.
At Westminster he’s an AP Capstone Scholar, president of the Science National Honor Society, a member of the Science Research Honor Society, a member of Mu Alpha Theta, Rho Kappa, an AP Scholar with Distinction, a member of the National Honor Society, and he will graduate Summa Cum Laude.
Lee has been a member of the Westminster soccer team since eighth grade. The team did well, winning districts in 2019 and going to the state finals in 2021.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
