August 22nd will mark the beginning of Ridgeview’s twenty-second year. We are excited to welcome our new and returning families, and very excited that we are beginning to move away from the strangeness of the past two years that was marred by the pandemic and its related restrictions.

Read the full Commencement Address

Thank you for being with us this evening. It is a tremendous privilege to be on stage as the representative of so many different people’s hard work. I hope that my words tonight will do justice to the passion and stamina of our teachers, staff, and students.

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.