Westmont welcomes four excellent new tenure-track professors to campus this fall. Sam Cole (economics and business), Linghui Han (economics and business), Paul Mena (communication studies), and Anna Jordan (‘07; English) each bring a deep Christian faith and a desire to challenge students to think deeply while learning broadly. “Westmont is distinct because our faculty are […]
Danna McGrew, partner in the advisory and audit department of Bartlett, Pringle & Wolf, is the new chairman of the Scholarship Foundation of Santa Barbara. Her two-year term started at the weekend. A Santa Barbara native, McGrew earned a bachelor’s degree in business economics at UCSB before joining the accounting firm in 1992. She was […]
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A record three Westmont graduates have earned prestigious Fulbright Scholarships this year to teach and conduct research around the world. Ebun Kalejaiye (’23) will teach English in Spain, Cody LeFebre (’22) will teach English in Colombia, and Valerie Swisher (’22) will study personal experiences and perceptions of mental health care in Hungary. Also, recent graduate […]
Our town’s schools are holding their graduations from May 21 through June 9th this year. The eight local school graduations are covered in order of occurrence. This issue has Cate School leading the charge with 71 graduates. The Montecito Journal wishes much success and offers congratulations to our graduates, school faculty, staff and parents! Cate […]
The 61-year-old Scholarship Foundation of Santa Barbara has awarded a total of $148 million in grants to students, with nearly $7.2 million this year to 1,864 recipients, retiring board chairman Matt Rowe told 200 guests at the annual dinner at the Santa Barbara Historical Museum. The scheme started humbly six decades ago with the awarding […]
Laguna Blanca School has announced that Brooke Green M.Ed. will be taking on the role of Head of the Lower School Montecito commencing July 1, 2023. Green is an alumnus of Laguna Blanca School 1997, has been the Lower School’s third grade instructor and their Learning Specialist grades two through four since 2013; and taught […]
Cold Spring School accepted both the California Distinguished School and California Exemplary Arts in Education awards from state Superintendent Tony Thurmond on Feb. 16 at the Disneyland Hotel. Cold Spring is the only school in the state to receive both honors. Five Santa Barbara County elementary schools were named 2023 California Distinguished Schools by the […]
On Saturday January 28, the Summerland Elementary School held a community-wide reception to celebrate the re-opening of the school. After being closed since summer 2021, this re-opening signifies a complete rebuild from the soil on up to new classrooms, a multi-purpose room, a library, an office and an outdoor playground funded by Measure U at […]
Happy new school year! From interviewing people for this column, I have learned a lot about what it means to be a young person, and I have learned a lot of what it means to be a student. In honor of the new academic year, this edition of Dear Montecito is for the new college […]
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Wendy Eley Jackson brings more than a quarter century of experience in film and television to Westmont as the theater department’s new artist/scholar-in-residence for justice, reconciliation, and diversity. Jackson, a native of Atlanta, is teaching Documentary Filmmaking, Screenwriting, and Creative Writing this semester for the theater and English departments. “My hope is to find a […]
Steve L. Porter, a longtime professor of spiritual formation, theology, and philosophy, is the new senior research fellow and executive director of Westmont’s Martin Institute for Christianity and Culture. The institute seeks to support a new generation of leaders in the area of Christian spiritual formation and to establish this discipline as a domain of […]
New national rankings and economic indicators establish Westmont as one of the top Christian liberal arts colleges in the U.S. once again. Westmont, in its 85th anniversary year, improved its overall score and rose in five other ranking categories to remain in the top tier of the 2023 U.S. News & World Report’s National Liberal […]






