Pacifica Stories

Each weekday Lindsey walks onto campus at Fairfax High School in West Hollywood to engage her first-year biology students. Teaching high schoolers is a joy, and teaching them a subject she loves is a double joy. In addition to teaching, Lindsey sponsors the junior class leaders, organizes freshmen orientation, and is part of the Fairfax social committee.

Her academic passions started at Pacifica. She excelled in humanities and the STEM fields, with deeper interests in romantic literature, theology, and microbiology. Outside of the classroom, she served in student government, played volleyball, and traveled to Israel with the school. Lindsey returned to Israel during her undergraduate studies at UCLA.

Lindsey deepened her interests as a biology major and an English minor at UCLA. A large part of her UCLA journey was leading an organization called Project Literacy. Project Literacy is a non-profit community service organization dedicated to improving literacy rates in the Los Angeles region through one-on-one tutoring for youths and adults. The four communities ProLit serves are Watts, Mar Vista, Vernon, and Baldwin Hills. Lindsey first served as one of 120 tutors. By her junior year, she was the organization’s president, organizing tutoring sites and transportation, raising the yearly budget, writing grants, training tutors, and tutoring. 

The experience of Project Literacy propelled Lindsey toward teaching. After graduating, she joined Teach for America and found her home at Fairfax High School. Along the way, Lindsey gained her Master in Education from Loyola Marymount University.

During her summers at UCLA, Lindsey had the joy of counseling high school students at Mt. Hermon’s Ponderosa, located in Santa Cruz, California. Engaging high school students on their terms in a beautiful setting while pointing them to God gave Lindsey a vision for her vocation in teaching. She finds her work meaningful and purposeful.

Pacifica gave Lindsey a vision for education. She saw the value of relationships, integration of faith and learning, and what a formative education looks like. At Pacifica, Lindsey learned the value of building a life over simply resume building.