Now begins a new year. As noted during the last academic year, the goal was to make big changes that feel small. Alongside our preparations over the summer to keep our students and staff safe throughout the present, much thought and preparation have been given to the future.

Welcome parents and students, faculty and staff, friends, neighbors, and all others who are joining us today to celebrate the achievements of these students.

During teacher training last August, many of us wondered aloud whether we would be allowed to remain open beyond the first week of school. Despite the flurry of often contradictory and ever-changing guidance, orders, mandates, and recommendations from district, municipal, county, state, federal, and global authorities, nine months later we have somehow arrived at the end of the year.

Just north of Fort Collins in the 1880s, an area called Soapstone sprung up and was sustained by sugar beet cultivation and the oil industry. There, outside of Waverley (a town named after the Sir Walter Scott novels) along Owl Canyon Road, a school called the Moessner School was built in the early 1900s. According to an oral history, it had just two teachers with the humorous names of Hail and Frost. Each Friday, parents attended a social event at the schoolhouse, listened to recitations, and discovered something about what their children were learning. A more intimate or well-informed school community is difficult to imagine.

Apta superaque was adopted as the school’s rallying cry back in March of the previous year, and the exigency at that time was to sort through the rapidly changing ‘guidance’ being provided by governmental and health authorities to determine the manner in which Ridgeview would remain open to the greatest number of students for the longest period of time.

In 1976, President Gerald Ford, in officially recognizing Black History Month, called on Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

Ridgeview has for many years now welcomed students to school each morning—not by greeters, but by administrators and board members. Each morning we say hundreds of hellos, but our hundreds of hellos are of late only rarely returned. Not only is there the absence of a verbal response, but eyes rarely meet, and smiles are rarely seen. The pandemic has mitigated our once determined civility. Faces, half hidden by masks, social distancing, and remote attendance disjointed by latency have caused our estrangement with one another to grow deeper and our sociability more stunted and strained. This is not an insignificant deficit.

As we inch forward, it bears briefly reviewing some of the lessons we have learned since last March.

Shakespeare has Macbeth deliver a nihilistic soliloquy that begins, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.” When death waits for each of us, what can be the ultimate meaning of our lives regardless of how floridly or cleverly they are described in exquisite language?

Please read this seasonal message from Mr. Anderson.

We want to provide you with a brief update about our school’s operations during the pandemic.

For students, the first day of each new school year is generally fraught with a mishmash of anxiety, giddiness, and weariness. For most adults, a memory of these distinct feelings persists.