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Westminster Christian School senior Noah Lopez-Calleja created a program called Student Voice. The idea was to give students a voice in the administration of the school.
“We started doing it last year,” he says. “We are implementing it this year. It was sort of a team thing. I was the one spearheading it.”
He spearheaded the implementation as the Class president.
“What’s the biggest impact we can make?” he says. “A lot of student government associations don’t do much. You plan dances, you plan events. We wanted to impact the daily lives of students.”
His goal this year was to help all students to feel comfortable at school.
“We wanted people to feel that they are home,” he says. “We wanted to make sure we were being good to that promise. That everyone felt safe. That they felt safe to talk and everyone valued their opinion.”
Implementation of the program started with committee meetings and listening to feedback from their peers.
“To make sure everyone is truly represented,” he says. “We created a procedure as to how it would be done. Meeting with students who had a concern. It was a lot of teamwork, group work.”
Lopez-Calleja says they wanted to be sure they could meet with the administration about the program. The plan was approved by the student activities director and then went up the ladder.
“Students listening to their peers and see what’s wrong, there a difference when taken to the administration and see the results,” he says. “It’s not for the administration to address, this was for students to address and bring back to the administration,”
Before the program was official, he says they sent out surveys in March 2020 when everything was shut down.
They presented the results to the administration. The survey addressed class work and teaching online.
“The teacher and students benefited. Teachers were able to do things that students responded to,” he says. “That pandemic, that whole, crazy transitions for all schools. We saw a gap and filled it as a committee, and we got started. Now we’re making it accessible to more students.”
This year they worked to adapt the program.
“Student sometimes feel that it’s out of reach, that they can’t have a voice,” he says. “We all said this is a school where the students’ voices are heard. The students are valued as individuals and their concerns are taken into account.”
Lopez-Calleja not only represented the Class of 22 all four years, he also represented the school on the varsity swim team for four years. He swam the 50 free and 100 free and was part of the record holding team in the 200 relay. He went to Regionals in the 2020-2021 swim season and participated in the 100-free, 50-free, 200-medly relay and the 200-freestyle relay.
He was also the president and founder of the Geography Club.
“I founded it the 2019-2020 school year,” he says. “We went to the Geography Bee that year. Because of COVID, it has been shut down. As a club we have practices, we’ll discuss geopolitics.”
He was on the Honor Science Research Team. He did research on Alzheimer’s and fruit flies.
At Miami-Dade County Science Fair, he was rated Superior for the Alzheimer’s project, which introduced Alzheimer’s in fruit flies.
He was president of the Quiz Bowl team, a member of the National Honor Society, Rho Kappa, the Science National Honor Society and Mu Alpha Theta.
Lopez-Calleja will be going to the University of Florida study Computer Science.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
