Ridgeview’s annual Valborg event will take place on April 2. This will be the first time in some time that our community will come together to welcome spring in this uniquely Ridgeviewian way, and we are seeking and anticipating one of the largest turnouts in our history.

In a recent essay entitled The Unbearable Bleakness of Schooling for Commentary magazine, Robert Pondiscio has written about the “psychic toll” the pandemic and its related restrictions have taken on children.

We have ambitions for our students. Every school does. If they are not singularly unique at Ridgeview, I would nevertheless assert that they deviate from the majority’s contention about what school is for.

As many are now aware, Larimer County has chosen to end its mask mandate on February 12. The recommendation from the health department is to continue masking children in schools; however, Poudre School District, Ridgeview’s authorizer, has elected to return to a mask optional setting and Ridgeview will do likewise.

Once, as a new teacher back in 2007, I was walking down the upper-school hallway as classes were going on. A group of girls were talking loudly and laughing walking toward me near the drinking fountains, while a man stood on a ladder changing the long, fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling.

In our hardened tempers and quotidian frustrations, it is easy to dismiss the miracle of a season acclaimed for its liberal feeling and liberal giving. Nevertheless, this little community of ours has never failed to rise to the occasion and to reaffirm that people are worthy of our most humane hopes and ambitions.

The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is too often cast as a mere prelude to some more magical season. Time passed, though, is still time gone, and it is for us to make of any span of life something more memorable than the humdrum of early-winter droning.

Today is Veterans Day – the 102nd since President Wilson brought it into being as Armistice Day in 1919.

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.