Lake Washington High School
 
Ndidi Opara is the daughter of an African immigrant father and an African American mother.  Ndidi attends Lake Washington High School, where she serves as ASB President.  In all of the activities she pursues, whether thety be school leadership, working in social media for Kirsten Harris-Talley's election in the 37th legislative district, or writing for StudentVoice, she pursues a public that is civically engaged.  Ndidi believes that this can be achieved through political education, community organizing, movement-based politics, and local advocacy.  When it comes to advocacy, she has pursued it through research about Rap music, social advocacy, and the American Color-line in Music Marketing.  Her work was recently published in Volume 9, Issue 1 of the Journal of Student Research, and she was one of 32 students in the world to receive this honor.  Ndidi also advocates for educational reform and equitable schools as a Journalism Fellow for StudentVoice, where she is published as well.
 
Juanita High School
 
Jessie Batzel is a senior at Juanita High School, where she’s taken rigorous courses and exams in the Cambridge Program, and challenged herself to be the best she can be.  Jessie plans to study fashion merchandising in college and become a fashion stylist, and then transition into a creative director role, preferably at a large fashion house.  Fashion has a reputation for being classist, pretentious, and rude, but Jessie wants to undermine this stereotype.  She aims to be the kindest person in fashion, proving that you don’t have to be mean to be a good leader and boss.  She believes one of her major accomplishments was when, at 16 years old, she became the youngest intern to work at Luly Yang Couture.  Another is traveling to Puerto Rico in 2019 and to help rebuild houses damaged by Hurricane Maria.  Jessica says that when she was adopted from China, she didn’t talk for the first year.  When she started talking, she had a horrible speech impediment, which she overcame.  She loved talking, but people couldn’t understand her.  She describes nine years of speech therapy to overcome her communications challenge as another significant accomplishment in her life.