Mt. Lebanon selects junior commissioners for 2015-16
Nancy Lu is one of Mt. Lebanon’s junior commissioners for 2015-16.
Christian Vietmeier is one of Mt. Lebanon’s junior commissioners for 2015-16.
Ask a typical high school student about local government, and he or she is likely to change the subject.
Mt. Lebanon High School seniors Nancy Lu and Christian Vietmeier are looking forward to learning firsthand about the subjects confronting their elected officials.
They have been selected as junior commissioners for 2015-16, with each serving a semester of attending meetings of the Mt. Lebanon Commission. They will report on school events and take information about municipal issues back to their fellow students.
Both are familiar to some degree about how Mt. Lebanon’s government works. Nancy, for example, served last year as high school liaison to the municipal Environmental Sustainability Board, which serves in an advisory capacity for the commission. While attending board meetings, she learned a great deal about one of the main topics of discussion around the community, the perceived overabundance of deer.
“There also was a lot of talk about issues like pesticide use,” she said about the meetings. “It was very eye-opening in that respect.”
Christian’s mother, Kirsten Rydstrom, serves on Mt. Lebanon’s Community Endowment Board.
“I got taken along to some of the meetings when I was younger,” he recalled. “I learned to listen.”
The students were selected from among several applicants for junior commissioner, and each brings an impressive scholastic résumé to the position.
Nancy has excelled in academic competitions dating back to middle school. She has won the student contest of the American Chemical Society’s Pittsburgh Section for two years in a row. By doing so, she qualified to take the U.S. National Chemistry Olympiad test, on which she scored so well that she was one of only two students in Pennsylvania to achieve high honors.
She also has competed with a high degree of success in the Robert Morris University School of Engineering Science and Mathematics Science Bowl, Pittsburgh Regional Science and Engineering Fair, Department of Energy High School Science Bowl and the Business and Professional Women’s MathCounts competition. In 2012, she scored the highest in MathCounts among female students in Pennsylvania.
Christian is a member of Mt. Lebanon High School’s varsity tennis and golf teams. In tennis, he served as captain as a junior helped his team make it to the semifinals in both the Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League and Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association during the 2015 season.
Both junior commissioners have experience volunteering in the community, Nancy at the Asbury Heights assisted living community and Christian at a men’s homeless shelter in East Liberty. And both plan to further their education, with Nancy studying chemical engineering and Christian, biomedical engineering.