Students enjoy the diverse spread of ethnic foods at today’s ceremony honoring students who earned the Maryland Seal of Biliteracy.

Around 60 students attended the ceremony, which was organized by Whitman’s foreign language department. To earn the Seal of Biliteracy, students had to have shown proficiency in listening, speaking, reading and writing in a language other than English—this could be demonstrated through scoring a 4 or 5 on any AP Language and Culture exam or through attaining minimum scores on a variety of other tests.

The ceremony featured a guest speaker—Dr. Lisa Meister—who talked about how learning Spanish has been an enormous help to her throughout her career in medicine. Principal Robby Dodd and MCPS foreign language department officials also attended.

“It was a great celebration of the language-speaking community at Whitman and of all of our hard work,” senior Max Rothman said. “It was well organized and put together, and it felt really meaningful.”