So Much to Celebrate

Craig Gemmell

May 21 2021

As I started my day, I scanned my next week’s calendar and found that virtually every moment over the coming week is in some way about celebration—either the planning of celebration or the act of gathering to reflect and cheer before moving on to the next event.

A year ago I was sweating over my graduation remarks to be delivered from Brown Field and beamed around the world to graduates who left in haste in March and entered online learning for the course of the spring. Apart from me, a few administrators, and the film crew, Brown Field and the broader campus were lifeless. It all felt wrong.

What a difference a year makes.

Today I spent 10 minutes trying to get to my office because kids and adults just kept stopping me to talk. A great problem to have. And our seniors are not allowing their fun together to be compromised while they finish up their last assignments—I thus had to wait at Bailey’s Bubble for my favorite ice cream, Moose Tracks, as a pack of seniors got there before me. Another great problem to have. It all feels right.

Consequently, I find myself reeling with gratitude as we transact the business of community in these halcyon days of late May because we’ve almost entirely made it through the scary tunnel that is a pandemic. And we’ve done so because we’ve worked together. Students, teachers, parents, administrators, and staff have triumphed together, and this radical expression of what community is and can do has quite literally kept me (and I daresay many others) going as we navigate through our last days together before the quartet plays and the graduation procession makes its way onto Brown Field.

In my reeling, I’ve yet to make sense of the particulars of how we’ve gotten here against the odds, but a few thoughts are starting to take shape.

First, the only constant here seems to be change, and the agility built into our institutional DNA has been useful in navigating the particularly unpredictable world of late.

Second, the particular people we’ve collected together here—the students, teachers, parents, staff, and administrators—chose to join this community because of a central focus: Brewster’s preparing diverse thinkers for lives of purpose. Intuitively, all in our community seemed to embrace the challenges we’ve faced as an inextricable part of our work, rendering the learning deeper and more resonant with our mission. If not for the unexpected challenges we all would not have grown so much.

I’m also early in the process of understanding how this past stretch will inform our future, but again, a few mere thoughts are taking shape.

Primarily, that we’ve emerged from the 2020-21 school year significantly stronger by every conventional measure is an odd gift we need to cherish.

Moreover, we need to build on our ever-stronger foundation by being bold as we crest this hill. And bold we shall be.