Let me take you
back to the early morning of September 7th 2006, the first day of
Kindergarten for the Class of 2019. Let
me tell you about this guy…
He stood there
uncertain about what to do. Tentatively,
he walked into school with a sense of fear, wonder, and excitement about this
new place of learning. He had a lot of
questions! He wore neatly pressed
clothes and fresh new shoes. He had
packed a lunch but worried about with whom he would eat. He fretted about making friends because he
was new to Needham and nobody knew him, probably nobody even cared! “Wait!
If no one will like me,” he asked himself. “And I’ll get lost on the way
to the bathroom (and I have to go real bad!!) and the teachers will probably
hate me, and the kids will make fun of me! And… and…” He panicked.
On that first and
beautiful autumn day back in 2006, beads of sweat formed on his forehead as he
peered down the long school corridor. “What
am I doing here?” he asked himself.
Suddenly, a small
boy, a Kindergartener, someone in the class of '19, jostled him at the entrance, reached
up, grabbed his hand and excitedly announced: “Time for school!” And as soon as he looked down into that
smiling and joyful boy’s face… the Superintendent realized that it was going to
be OK.
And so, your
first day of Kindergarten, which also happened to be my first day as Needham’s
new superintendent, turned out be OK!
Since the Class
of ’19 and I began together in the Needham Public Schools in the fall of 2006, well,
we’ve grown up. We’ve learned a lot, made some mistakes, enjoyed new friends, gone
on field trips together, made some more mistakes, had fun at Lego League and
Robotics—you even let me drive the robot at a tournament this year! In 6th
grade we cheered like crazy people during the Pig Races at High Rock (For the
record: Mrs. Liner’s Cluster 4 advisory dominated!).
At Pollard we took
action together during STA Day; we’ve participated in the musical and we’ve
celebrated athletic championships. We’ve puzzled over math problems—for you it
was calculus, for me it was the school budget.
We called out injustice, homophobia, and racism. We laughed a lot…and
we mourned together.
We’ve grown up in
these schools, you and I. You have
become strong, smart, actively engaged young women and men who will take on
this world like nobody’s business! It’s time for you to move on and get going.
You’re ready.
But I’ll hang
back. We came to the Needham Public
Schools together, but we part ways this evening. It’s been a lot of fun and you, well you have been
superb classmates and students. Over these 13 years I’ve learned a lot from you,
and I am grateful for your examples and lessons of teamwork, creativity, sportsmanship,
decency, scholarship, and civility. Thank you for being some of the best
teachers I have had; thank you for being a friend.
And when friends
say goodbye, they wish each other well, they offer words of comfort and support
for the journey ahead. My farewell to
the Class of 2019 is pretty straightforward:
Take care.
Take care, Class
of 2019. Now this farewell has a double
meaning. First and foremost, it’s a
simple goodbye, it’s a way to say I will miss you and want you to be
careful. It’s a way to urge caution and
prudence and a way to encourage good judgment and good sense. My mom uttered it to me a million times whenever
I headed off to school, got onto my bike, drove the car, headed off to college,
and finally when I moved away to California a long time ago.
Take care. Buckle up, pack a toothbrush, charge your
phone, and bring extra underwear! Be
sensible, be safe, know that there is family, there are friends who worry about
you and want you to be OK. We can’t go
with you to remove obstacles from your path or solve every problem; we won’t be
able to smooth over the inevitable failure or heartbreak. But before you go, we can look you straight in
the eye, wrap an arm around your shoulder and with love say, “Take care.”
This farewell has
a second purpose I want you to remember:
You see, take care also means to accept responsibility; to assume a role
in your community, in this world, that requires you to be involved and to act
with conviction, virtue, and courage. It
is an acknowledgement that you have an obligation to serve others. Take care is
a call to action; a requirement to look beyond your own comfort, speak out
against inequality and bigotry; discover new ways to solve intractable and
stubborn problems; expand your relationships and dialogue with those who vote,
pray, love, or look differently than you. Push yourself to ask difficult
questions and demand honesty and integrity from others. Look out for those who
are differently abled and those who are impoverished or lonely. Take
care of this fragile and wonderful world.
Take care of those whose lives and voices are often marginalized because,
as members of this class reminded us in a recent Greater Boston Project
presentation, their voices most certainly matter.
“Take care” is
both an expression of comfort and a charge to serve. In the end, it is a
hope-filled farewell: Take care of
yourself. Take care of others. Graduates, as you face a new morning in your
lives, I want you to know how terribly proud I am of you. I will miss you.
And thanks for grabbing
my hand and welcoming me into your Kindergarten class all those years ago as we
began our journey of learning and leading in the Needham Schools. Class of 2019, I wish you well.
Take Care.
