By Skyler ’24
The history of Harvard-Westlake is different from that of any other school. I am not just talking about the buildings, but the incredible community of people who worked and learned inside of them. There are current teachers at HW who used to attend the school and whose parents even used to teach here. Everyone that attends becomes a part of our school’s legacy and will never be forgotten.
Most people do not know much about the history of our school, and it was not until recently that I took the time to appreciate how far we have come. Harvard School was a military boarding school for boys that was established in 1900 by Grenville C. Emery. Emery asked the Harvard University for permission to use its name and its president at the time, Charles W. Eliot, agreed. Westlake School for Girls opened its doors in 1904. The school was purchased by Sydney Temple, whose daughter, Helen Temple Dickinson, was headmistress until 1966.
In October 1989, the boards of trustees of Harvard and Westlake made the decision to merge the schools. Tom Hudnut was the very first Headmaster and full coeducation began in September 1991. It has been less than 30 years since the merge of the schools, and yet look at all the amazing things we have accomplished in terms of both extracurriculars and academics! For the HW Class of 2019, there were 27 National Merit Semifinalists. Harvard-Westlake fields 22 varsity teams in the California Interscholastic Federation Southern Section, as well as teams on the junior varsity, club, and middle school levels. Sixty percent of Harvard-Westlake students participate in interscholastic sports. Incredible actors, sports players, artists, scholars and more were walking out of Harvard-Westlake’s doors with bright futures ahead of them. People became fascinated with how well students from HW were doing and soon the enrollment number quickly grew to almost 1600 with grades 7th-9th at the Westlake North Faring Road location and grades 10-12 at Harvard’s Coldwater Canyon location. As you can see, Harvard-Westlake holds such a rich history and we should be grateful to all the people who have helped to shape our school into what it is today.
If you want to take a deeper look at HW’s history, check it out here: https://www.hw.com/about/History
