English teacher, Jean-Yves Vesseau, who created a “United Nations” debating club this year, proudly reports back about the success our students had at a local conference held at USC last Friday.

“Just a quick note to let you know that the conference at USC on Friday went extremely well. Organized by Global Classrooms and the LA Unified School District, it gathered around 600 students from different schools all over Los Angeles (public, private, international, and charter schools).

As delegates of Israel and Libya and members of the Security Council committee, LILA 11^th graders Emily, Hayley, Steven-Claude and Levonti discussed the question of Palestine for 6 straight hours. They were able to clearly expose and defend their opinions and proved to be also very efficient at convincing their fellow delegates.

I am proud to report that during the conference many faculty advisors (a bit of a pompous name the accompanying teachers are given) started asking around to find out who were the delegates from Israel and Libya as they seemed to be particularly in command of the topic. This impression was confirmed during the closing ceremony, held at the Bovard Auditorium, when Emily and Hayley were awarded the prize for "best delegates," an amazing achievement for their first participation (they managed to have their resolution ratified, which is the most difficult thing to do, especially in the Security Council where schools only send their elite students).

The students were rightfully very proud of their accomplishments.  I just wanted to let you know first because I know the amount of work and stress it has been for the 4 of them and to see them do so well and act so passionately deserves a good round of applause!”

Thanks, Jean-Yves for your dedication and for making this amazing project available to our students! …

Yet another example of the exciting things happening at LILA… and another example of just how talented, intelligent, verbal, and awesome our students are!