Mejia, Speaker’s Club bring insight and speeches to students

While the Chapel Hill High School Speaker’s club only has one member, many students at- tend its meetings for the club’s speakers series.

In fact, the lone member and founder, junior Austin Mejia, would hardly refer to the organization as a “club.”

“The only thing that the club does is put on the Speaker’s Series,” Mejia said. “The reason why the term ‘club’ is used is so that we can get support from the administration, like any club would.”

With the help of the club’s sponsor, science teacher Alan Rissberger, Mejia started the club at the beginning of the school year to solve what he believed was the most pressing issue at Chapel Hill High School.

“We’ve gotten so competitive, so bogged down in class rank and grade point average, that we forget how wonderful education should feel,” Mejia said. “Once someone decides that they’re going to high school to primarily get into college, and not to learn, they also stop learning about others.”

Mejia believes that the Speaker’s Club will amend the issue by making firsthand learning more available to students.

The club’s speaker for the second quarter was Joe Dittmar, a survivor of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, who spoke about his experiences on the day of the attacks in New York.

“Many have heard from a parent or teacher what it was like to see [the attacks] on TV,” Mejia said. “I never really understood it until I heard my last guest speaker talk about his experience. Nothing was more powerful than hearing his voice crack describing the sadness and pain he witnessed.”

History teachers Holly Loranger and Veena Rajan offered their students extra credit for attending the event.

“I valued getting to hear a personal account of something that I’ve usually only been taught about in a more abstract, large-scale historical context,” junior attendee Maddie Wiener said. “Hearing about September 11 from the individual perspective made it a lot more tangible and accessible as a listener.”

The club will be hosting Betsy Saul, founder of Petfinder.com and one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Important People” in the fourth quarter. Petfinder.com, the largest online pet adoption agency, was launched in 2005 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when a large number of animals were displaced.

Mejia’s “dream speaker” is the 18-year-old Pakistani female education activist and the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Malala Yousafzai.

“I think it’s easy to take for granted a lot of things in life, like our education,” Mejia said. “Hearing someone who has had to fight so hard for the right to learn would give the student body a lot of perspective in their lives and hopefully inspire them.”

Mejia is working to schedule Chris Rosati, a man with Lou Gehrig’s disease who lectures about the importance of living life to the fullest, as the club’s second fourth quarter speaker.

“Really, I would invite anyone with something important and unique to say,” Mejia said.