[Abigail] Dr. Milaschewski, Mr. Tracey, members of the school committee, teachers, family and friends, and my fellow classmates, it is an honor to address you here this evening. We are gathered here today to celebrate this milestone along the path to our future endeavors. We’d like to recognize the invaluable support of RMHS sta, family, and everyone else who helped us get to this moment. It wasn’t an easy four years to be teaching or learning, and we’re so thankful to you all who have helped us through it.
[Abigail] My name is Abigail LeBovidge, and I’m honored to have the opportunity to speak to you all as salutatorian this year. I’d like to thank my parents, my brother, and my guidance counselor, Ms. Santa Maria, for all their support throughout my high school years. I’d also like to thank my teachers, especially Mr. McIntire, Sr. Bosco, and Ms. Lombardo, for cultivating my curiosity across subjects and helping me grow as both a student and a person. Before I go on, I’d like to take a moment to invite up this year’s valedictorian.
[Althea] Hello, my name is Althea Culaba. It is nothing short of a privilege to address you all as valedictorian. I give special thanks to my family: my mother, for always supporting my academic endeavors, and my father, for always drumming really loudly whenever I was trying to study. I’m also grateful for my guidance counselor, Mr. Sacco, for guiding me through these trying years of young adulthood, my English teachers, Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Mooney, for their constant encouragement, and my Stats and Calc teacher, Mr. Skehan, for the enthusiasm that he brought with each and every class.
[Althea] To say the least, our high school experience has been far from normal. However, despite numerous alarm interruptions throughout freshman year and the trials of virtual learning and social distancing, we’ve managed to push through. None of us are the same person as we were the first time we heard the 2019 hit Old Town Road, but we’ve helped each other grow into well-accomplished human beings.
[Althea] You may have realized by now that we have decided to speak together and share the stage, rather than give individual speeches (as done traditionally). Abigail and I, as both peers and friends, felt that it was appropriate to combine our voices, as we both feel strongly about this particular topic, and we didn’t want to bore you all with the same speech twice.
[Abigail] While it’s an honor to address you all today, it is easy to glorify these titles of valedictorian and salutatorian as wholly representative of academic success. Our high school experience is so much more than the classes we take and the grades we achieve. The purpose of graduation is to celebrate students, and that doesn’t include just GPA. This number doesn’t take into account individual students’ passions outside of school, nor what they contribute to our community through arts, community service, and sports. It also doesn’t take into account the amount of toilet paper they threw into the trees, or perhaps, had to clean out of the trees.
[Althea] Every student sitting here today has had a unique and irreplaceable impact on our collective high school experience. It would be impossible to even summarize all of them in this speech. Still, we’d like to take the time to acknowledge the eorts of a few of the many students who’ve made inuential contributions to the school, which may not have been solely academic.
[Abigail] To start, RMHS’s drama club would not have been the same without the likes of Lucy Boyden, elected class representative during her rst 3 years, then as president of the club her senior year, ensuring it ran smoothly in the absence of their advisor.
James Murphy, current captain, and 4-year varsity starter, led our football team to great success while also holding a 32 and 9 (32-9) career record, amongst other achievements.
Sophia Ortins has left a prominent impact through community service, contributing greatly to numerous social justice groups in Reading, including the student group soak-a4EJI (SOCA4EJI) and the town advisory group, PAIR.
Jack Quinn led as captain in cross country, winter track, and spring track, setting numerous school records—one of which, the 800m, set during the writing of this speech.
Michenzi McKenna has been tremendously inuential as a volunteer at Ironstone Farm for 5 and a half years, accumulating over 2,000 hours of volunteer time aiding in ee-quine (equine)-assisted therapy.
[Althea] Furthermore, Amanda Frechette received a Gold Key in the Regional Scholastic Art Awards for her illustration entitled “Bundled Up”, and RMHS’s Fine & Performing Arts Book Award for drawing.
Elizabeth Strack, who served as band president and low brass section leader for the marching band this year, played trombone in three of RMHS’s bands.
Sedona Skenderian, captain of the girls’ track team, tied the 100m record, and, along with Audrey Thornton, was part of the relay team that broke the 4-by-1 (4x100m) and 4-by-2 (4x200m) records.
And our choirs would not have been the same without Laurie Wise, vice president of the Choral Department, winner of the Kristin Killian and National Choral awards, and exceptional member of every possible choir.
[Abigail] The impact that each of our classmates has had on our high school experience is clear in every memory we have of our time at RMHS. We hope that in future years, the honor of speaking at graduation can be shared with student leaders to reect the diversity of contribution within our student body, instead of being decided on the basis of grades alone. So much of what our classmates do is worthy of recognition. Recognizing these people at the graduation ceremony would acknowledge their fundamental role in our collective road towards graduation.
[Abigail] With that in mind, I’d like to share a memory from before I knew what GPA was, from back when our grades were still marked as E: exceeding, M: meeting, A: approaching, and so on. I still remember the last recess of elementary school. I remember wondering what I was going to do with it, worrying that if I didn’t scrape up those last few ticking minutes of freedom like the last bits of soup in a near-empty bowl, sopped up with bread so I could savor every bit, I would be left unfullled, forever regretting my careless wasting of precious moments.
As it turns out, I don’t remember what I ended up playing that day. The memories I do have are scattered across my elementary school years. I remember playing Warrior Cats in the forest behind the playground. I remember crafting tiny ranches out of sticks and stones, and collecting inchworms to ll them with. If recess was a soup, it wasn’t something I ran out of, consuming a bit each year until I was left with an empty bowl. It was something I made. It was “mix two teaspoons crushed pine needles, three buttery acorn insides, and half a cup of rainwater.” It was bits of mulch inside my shoes, and chasing the four-square ball across the asphalt.
Standing on the blacktop on that last day of elementary school, everything felt so nal. I’d been taught that every essay needs a strong conclusion, that every story needs a satisfying ending. But real life isn’t cut so cleanly into beginning-middle-end. In real life they’re woven together and out of order, with middles for breakfast, endings for lunch, beginnings for dinner. I remember that last recess, but I don’t remember the last time I climbed up the slide, the last time I jumped o the swings, the last time I perched on top of the monkey bars. If I tried to ll a book with lasts, I’d run out of space.
I look back at this high school now, taking in the staircases I’ve spent four years climbing, the doors I’ve walked through hundreds of times, the doors I’ve never opened. As my high school days draw today to a close, I no longer feel that weight of “making the most of it”. I still feel the sadness, the excitement, the nervousness of a fast-approaching ending. This time, though, I’m not rushing to add ingredients to the soup. We’ve already stirred in the friendships, the curiosities, the half cup of rainwater.
All that’s left is to wonder what kinds of soup we might make next. With that, I’d like to pass the stage to Althea to conclude our speech.
[Althea] Every single person seated in front of me today has each traveled their own unique journey, and yet we’ve all arrived at this same destination. Despite the vast dierences between your life, my life, and the lives of the people next to you, we’ve still assembled here, together. This—us—is the very crux of what this speech is trying to get at.
I’m going to explain this in the only way I know how, and that is through music:
I come from a family with a strong grasp on our native culture, and with that comes an inherent connection to music. Singing, playing, dancing, or whatever other form of musical and cultural expression is as inTEgral to us Filipinos as our left legs are to walk. Not a day goes by that I don’t hear mued Tagalog melodies wafting from the kitchen in the waking hours of the morning, whether it be from the speakers of our Alexa or through my Lolo, humming under his breath.
While Tagalog may be our ocial language, the language of music is able to express the nuanced sentiments of our culture on a far deeper level. It’s why I choose to sing, why my father chooses to drum, why my titos and titas choose to jam with us every weekend—where words fail, we play.
In a broader sense, experiencing music is simply the audiation of the human experience; it is the visualization, in an aural sense, of the intangible aspects of human existence. And it is with this vessel of song where the voice of collective consciousness and humanity begins to reveal itself. Despite language barriers, cultural upbringings, socioeconomic backgrounds, and the like, a song will drive all kinds of people to travel the same wave of human emotion with every change in key or shift in dynamic. This journey may not last more than a few minutes, and yet it successfully turns humanity—inherently diverse and varied in nature—into one: human.
We’ve all gathered here for one last time to bask in and celebrate our great orchestration. This graduation ceremony is much like a song, and each of us is an instrument playing beneath its surface. When we listen to any musical composition, we listen to every part of it. We take in every subtle bassline, every precise lyric, every careful strum of a chord—all of it, collectively, is something to be appreciated, cherished, and celebrated, for it is the eorts of the collective instrumentation that bring beauty to the musical experience.
Congratulations, class of 2023, we wish you all the best in the coming years.
