During Williston Northampton School’s 185th Convocation ceremony, Head of School Robert W. Hill III opened the ceremony with remarks for a new school year. Below are his words in full.
Welcome everyone the 185th opening session of the Williston Northampton School—it’s hard to picture the school in 1841 that Sam and Emily Williston founded, but we remain inspired by their vision to provide an education for those who previously had no such access. To you students just completing your first week of Williston, I hope you are beginning to feel at home. But I also know it takes a number of days and weeks to figure things out, and as a reminder, we are all here to help you. A special welcome to Brendan Hellweg, Class of 2011, as our keynote speaker—more on Brendan later.
The last time we were gathered here, or at least roughly out here, was for Commencement under the big tent and my sendoff message to the Class of 2025 was to be DIY students, to do the hard work yourselves. Today, we convene the year with an academic tradition that dates to the renaissance, and our assembling or Convocation, is the first of our formal ceremonies concluding with Commencement for the great Class of 2026!! In coming together like this, we are literally and figuratively forming our community for the school year. We are a school of xxx students from xxx countries and xxx States.
The building blocks and spirit, what I like to call the magic of Williston is sitting all around you: each of you with a unique background has a story to tell; each of you brings a singular perspective to Williston; each of you will offer different contributions throughout the school year.
How we choose to live as a Williston community, and this goes for everybody, has so much to do with all of the little choices and actions we make and take. Yes, there will inevitably be those big-stage moments, but the year will be defined by the sum of its parts, not by one speaker, or dance, or championship, as inspiring as those might be. Saying that means that each of us has a part to play, and just because you were here last year or the year before does not determine your role THIS year.
Take you seniors, the Class of 2026, as an example, your Williston year will fly by for most of you, and then off to college you go before you know it, entering a completely new environment. Four years after that, whether it’s a job or more school, you’ll be in an entirely new community. So, too, we are all on the same journey of replanting ourselves, because at the very least, we are each a little older and hopefully a bit wiser than we were last year. This year, as part of my mantra to be fully engaged as HUMANS, perhaps you extend yourself and take a chance more intentionally, and those new friendships and trusting relationships among peers and adults will follow. After all, building a community should not be left to chance; it cannot be trusted to the fates.
To illustrate what I mean, let me offer a personal example, since Mrs. Hill and I are becoming more familiar with Hancock, Maine, not so far from Bar Harbor for those who know that beautiful part of the state, and where we bought a home a few years ago. Your families probably have their own stories to share that determining where you live is not a simple thing–you take a big leap of faith when you move to a new location for a school, or a job, or whatever. If you assume that a Williston-like level of belonging will greet you wherever you go, ready-made, like your favorite take-out order, then you are an optimist.
Your “dream location” could, in reality, become a nightmare if you have neighbors that don’t like dogs and terrorize it with a broom (that happened once to us in a different state), or if your middle school aged daughter is so angry about a new location that she only refers to your house as a “biological holding facility.”
Fortunately for Mrs. Hill and me, our neighbors in Maine welcomed us with open arms from the very start—they were excited that someone, anyone, was moving into a house that had been unoccupied for two decades as it turned out.
But in thinking back, maybe I actually had to pass a hidden test in order to become fully welcomed. My neighbor, Dave, is an engineer by training and a lobster fisherman as a hobby. He and his wife keep about ten traps, and he invited me to go along with him one day to empty them out. I did not know the first thing about lobstering except what I’ve seen on Greatest Catch, and so I pictured big waves and lots of gear—so I guess in hindsight, I took a bit of a risk when I said, “yes.” It turns out that the excursion was just in the bay behind his house, not some 20-miles offshore in spray capped seas.
And while my neighbor did all of the heavy lifting of pulling up the color-coded buoys with fifteen feet of rope attached to the lobster cage which measures about 3’x3’x2’, he did have me dive right into the business of extracting the lobsters and securing bands around their claws. Lobster fishing is heavily regulated in Maine, by minimum size and kind, and if you find an egg bearing female you must notch the tail fin and throw it back—so I learned a bit about conserving fisheries along the way. And if you’ve never seen a live lobster, they have two differently designed claws, one for cutting and one for chomping, and I don’t recommend testing either.
Dave hauled up the traps which contained anywhere from zero to four lobsters, and many of those I measured were too small to keep—until we got to the final trap which also happened to be closest to his dock. For this one, he asked me to bring it up, figuring that after watching him haul up nine traps, I could at least pull my weight and do one. Now I admit that I am not the largest human, but I like to think I’m reasonably fit, and so straining away to pull up the final trap of the day was not doing a lot for my ego or the dialogue in my head wondering what Dave thought of his new neighbor from Western Massachusetts. But when the trap broke the surface of the water, and I grunted and groaned to haul it over the gunwale, imagine my reaction when I saw that this trap was packed with lobsters—there must have been a dozen. So, after congratulating myself on the big haul, doing a little dab for the camera, and hollering “what a catch”, I noticed Dave chuckling away—as it turns out, the last trap was his collection cage where he stashed the previous day’s catch so they would be fresh for the weekend. The joke was on me, and it was a pretty good stunt.
So, my takeaway was an insight into my neighbor’s great sense of humor, Downeast Maine knowledge of lobstering, and six super fresh lobsters for our family, all for taking an initial risk of saying “yes.” It’s been three years since that auspicious beginning and the Hill family and the Perconti’s have become good friends, and I’d like to think that if all of us here apply a little of Dave’s good-natured humor and generosity along with a willingness for a little adventure, Williston will bloom with possibilities for you.