Upcoming 2024 graduate Kylie Price is a stand-out scholar and a familiar face around campus. As her last year at Castaic comes to a close, we are here to immortalize Price and her accomplishments.
Reviewing her high school years, Price describes her experience as “really rewarding.”
“High school can be such a fun time if you make it; your mindset determines that,” states Price.
As her freshman year was during the COVID-19 pandemic, she acknowledged that at first, her experience was fairly negative. However, once she shifted her mindset and took advantage of everything she could, she sought to make the next few years as memorable as she could.
Price has already received early admissions to the prestigious schools, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara, however, her ultimate goal is to attend Stanford or Georgetown University
She has been noted as an extremely hard-working and passionate student by teachers and peers, always putting her best foot forward and 100% into everything she does.
David Williams, social studies teacher and advisory teacher of Price recalls his own experiences with Price. “Kylie is a superlative student, she is extraordinary in almost every aspect, I’ve never seen anyone more hardworking and authentically dedicated to their learning process.”
Along with her teachers, Price is admired by many of her peers.
“I adore Kylie, she is extremely creative and compassionate,” stated Price’s long-term friend Rachel Burnett. “I am so excited to watch her grow and continue to support her as she continues to become the extremely successful woman she is.”
Price, out of all her many achievements on campus, said she is most proud of establishing Castaic’s speech and debate team.
“[Speech and Debate] was a long-term goal that I had and a program I wanted to develop at the school.”
She created the club as a freshman and later became the team’s coach during her junior year. This year, she’s focused on her coaching rather than competing, prepping the team for their competitions. Additionally, she has created her own website allowing other students to review the resources she uses for speech and debate.
During her competing days, she was an Original Oratory State Championship finalist in California and won a $4,000 scholarship as a semi-finalist at the Alliance Club Student Speaker Contest.
Vice President of Speech and Debate, sophomore Eliana McDowell, describes Price as intelligent, precise, and kind.
“She is inviting and inclusive with everybody and an overall good person,” McDowell said.
“She runs the club,” said Williams, who is also the advisor for the speech and debate club, “I’m the adult signing the paperwork but Kylie makes all of the executive decisions and the one training the next generation of speech and debate club members.”
“Even though when I’m gone it might be a difficult transition, I’m glad that I was able to leave a legacy behind at Castaic with the team that I created,” said Price.
In addition to the Speech and Debate club, she also is the founder and president of Students Demand Action, a club focused on activism against gun violence, and the Women’s Empowerment club, in which they discuss sociological problems that women face globally, especially within the media.
Another substantial accomplishment Price has achieved is creating and publishing her children’s book, The Golden Hat.
The story follows young Rosita as she embraces her curious nature on her first day of school, although her outspokenness affects her, and she gets bullied for her vast imagination. The narrative is a reimagining of her mother’s childhood, a version where her mother was supported by her parents in education.
“Writing the children was actually a final project for my women’s studies course” Price explains, “I chose to focus on supporting women in education”
However, she liked it so much that she decided to pursue publishing the short story.
The process took Price around a year, starting the project in the summer before junior year and finally getting to publish it in the second semester of her senior year.
Price shares that she was rejected by a lot of publishers at first, and when she finally found the right one, she then had to go through the editing process and work with illustrator, Teresa Alberini, to design all the the pages.
As her final note, Price’s advice is to “Just to get yourself out there.”
She explains how in her freshman and sophomore years she felt isolated as she didn’t talk to many people, “I felt like I wanted to be on my academic grind.”
The senior regrets not being in more study groups and classmate’s group chats, and reaching out to other people helped her academically as well as socially. “I’ve gotten so many jobs and opportunities from networking and just getting to know people,” said Price.
“Because ultimately you may think when you graduate you’ll never meet these people again, your relationships aren’t gonna matter– they 100% matter. These people will be recurring in your life. All the time. And you never know when an opportunity will show up.”
