Lakeside School

The following is an excerpt of a speech by Upper School Assistant Director Whitney Suttell. Find additional speeches by Matheus Keller ’26, Sonia Patten ’26, Student Government President Gresham Crone ’26, and Interim Head of School/Upper School Director Ryan Boccuzzi, on our blogs and reflections webpage.

… Class of 2026, I feel lucky to have been part of your journey through Upper School. I started working at Lakeside in the fall of 2022, the same time you started 9th grade. You are the first graduating class that I have seen all the way through Upper School and my first very dear advisees. Any teacher will tell you that their first class is always memorable. You are all very special to me.

Over the years, I have gotten to meet and know all of you. Some of you I met very early on, when you climbed out a window in the middle of the night during the freshmen retreat.

Others I got to know through your dedication to leadership roles such as Student Government, Senior Leaders, SALT leaders, members of the Judicial Committee, and of course, Varsity Assembly Committee.

I saw you win Metro League and State championships and perform in Anything Goes, Hadestown, Mean Girls, and Les Mis. I marveled at your art (shout-out to Kameirah’s Google Doodle), your music (shout-out to Johan for his incredible performance at Baccalaureate last night), and your creation of Lakeside’s own artificial-intelligence model, Project Andromeda.

I also saw some of you during your most difficult and vulnerable moments. It has been an honor to be with you, to share your joys and triumphs as well as your challenges and hardships.

Lakeside’s mission is to develop the creative minds, healthy bodies, and ethical spirits needed to contribute wisdom, compassion, and leadership to a global society. When I look out on all of your incredible faces, I see the fulfillment of this mission.

You showed us your creative minds in the culminating projects and presentations we have seen over the last few weeks. You created walking tours of Seattle. Held a mock trial presided over by a real judge. You developed your own philosophies of friendship. You presented research on chemotaxis in c. elegans, the effects of microplastics on plant growth, and how to make a do-it-yourself TASER.

We learned in our closing assembly on Friday that a shockingly small number of you get 7 hours of sleep a night, so there is definitely room to improve in the healthy bodies category. But we also know from Dr. Laurie Santos’ talk earlier this year that cultivating friendships is an essential component of health and well-being. And you have aced that category. Watching you sign yearbooks, play spike ball and hacky sack on the quad, and curl up with each other by the fire at 3 a.m. at prom, it is clear that you have close and meaningful relationships with each other.

Your ethical spirits have made a daily impact on Lakeside. You have written op-eds for Tatler; met with Mr. Boccuzzi and me to push for change in our community; told the truth when it was hard; and quietly picked up someone’s left-behind dishes in the WCC.

We know you will contribute wisdom, compassion, and leadership to the world because we have already seen you do this at Lakeside. You organized hundreds of high schoolers across the city to protest national immigration policy and ICE activity. You formed meaningful relationships in our community while tutoring, working at food banks, and building tiny houses. You mentored middle schoolers and helped them develop their own identities. In doing these things, you learned key lessons about yourself and your place in the world.

There is much for you to reflect on and be proud of today. If Dr. Bynum were here with us, he would likely remind you to focus on joy. He often said it is “the will to seek joy” that is at the heart of education. And so today I encourage you to think about the many small moments of joy you have had here. Maybe it was Holcenberg winning the house cup, the seniors soundly beating the adults in kickball, or the ice cream sundae bar at lunch. For me, it will be the laughter in my advisory as we exclaim at someone’s (usually Evan’s) absurd drawing in Telestrations or try to make sense of someone’s (also usually Evan’s) absurd clue for Cameleon. Hold on to these moments of joy for they will buoy you when you need it most.

In closing and in honor of Dr. Bynum who we all know is a poet, I want to share with you a poem I first heard at my own college graduation. It resonated with me at the time, and I have continued to share it with many graduating seniors since. I hope you find it as meaningful as I have. This is “Home” by Nancy Wood:

Hold on to what is good

even if it is

a handful of earth.

Hold on to what you believe

even if it is

a tree which stands by itself.

Hold on to what you must do

even if it is

a long way from here.

Hold on to life even when

it is easier letting go.

Hold on to my hand even when

I have gone away from you.

May you hold on to each other, hold on to what you have learned, and hold on to the values that make you Lakesiders. Congratulations, Class of 2026.