by John Osborn ·
Friday, June 12, 2026
The senior student government takes the stage under a magical sky. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)
Eighty-two members of the Bromfield School Class of 2026 received their diplomas Friday afternoon, June 5, in an annual ritual held rain-free on the school’s athletic field. The evening was near-perfect for the school’s 146th commencement, with temperatures hovering in the upper 80s and a lazy-hazy but cloudless sky overhead.
Two days earlier, at Senior Annual Awards Night, nearly 100 academic and extracurricular awards and scholarships were presented to deserving seniors for excellence in math, writing, world languages, science, engineering, visual arts, performing arts, technical theater, music, counseling, athletics, and citizenship. The Bromfield guidance office had announced that college-bound seniors had been accepted at 178 colleges and universities across the United States and in Canada, England, Scotland, and Australia.
During Friday’s commencement, speakers celebrated the class’ 13-year journey in Harvard schools, sending them off with warmth and practical wisdom.
Led by junior class marshals Bowen Clarke and Gisela Benway, the graduates-to-be marched onto the field to a recorded performance of the 1985 synth-pop hit “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by the English pop-rock band Tears for Fears, an ironic counterpoint, perhaps, to the messages of caring and collaboration that followed. The rows of white folding chairs facing the rostrum were three-quarters full as the 2026 seniors filed down the aisle at 5:30 p.m. and made their way onto bleachers, a river of blue and white, accented by the colored cords marking membership in honor societies.
Dress for the occasion was eclectic and befitting the summer-like weather. Many women wore full-length summer dresses. The men and students were less formally attired. Wide or narrow brimmed summer hats were a common sight, though most men were hatless. A few spectators had brought lawn chairs or blankets to stake positions on the periphery or under a tree. One attendee said he had considered bringing a parasol, then thought better of it. “I didn’t want to block my neighbor’s view,” he said. Only one umbrella was in sight.
The Harvard Garden Club dressed the entrance and stage in rhododendrons, lupines, and peonies drawn from members’ own gardens, supplemented by purchased delphiniums. Blue, said club member Kathy Hewitt, is a rarity among flowers; Bromfield blue had to be bought.
Before the speeches began, Assistant Principal of the Bromfield High School Julie Horton recognized six retiring educators whose combined years of service have shaped generations of Harvard students: Patricia Shepherd, a math teacher at Bromfield; Cynthia Ambrosino, a fifth-grade teacher; Deb Walker Lyvers, also a fifth-grade teacher; Marybeth Quaadgras, the Harvard Elementary School librarian; Elizabeth Hart, a kindergarten learning assistant; and Sharon Schmidt, a counseling administrative assistant. The audience responded with loud applause.
Superintendent of Schools Linda Dwight spoke first. This was her final graduation as Harvard’s superintendent, she noted, her own chapter closing at the same time as that of the one she was there to celebrate: her son, Timothy Dwight, who sat among his 2026 classmates.
Dwight evoked a local image to open her talk: geese in V-formation flying over Bare Hill Pond, each bird taking a turn at the lead, the flock stronger together than any one bird alone. The most meaningful accomplishments, she told the class, are achieved the same way. “Find people who make you better. Be the person who makes others better.”
As Harvard’s second female superintendent, she had one more thing to say, directed at the young women in the graduating class. People, she told them, would always have opinions about what leadership should look like. “Respectfully prove them wrong.”
Bromfield Principal Kim Murphy was attending her son’s graduation elsewhere. Horton stepped in as host. In her remarks, Horton observed that her usual role at graduation was lining students up in the library, walking them out as the processional began, and fist-bumping each one on their way across the field. Standing at the podium felt strange, she said. She had taught some of this year’s class in ninth-grade math, and that class had stayed with her. She remembered their bravery, their willingness to try things, their creativity, their collaboration. Learning, she told them, is a courageous act. “Be brave enough to make a mess.”
Faculty keynote speaker Bryce Mattie-Brown, a social studies teacher chosen by the senior class, acknowledged from the start that she might be out of touch with their generation. She capitalizes words in her texts, she said, and punctuates them, which her younger sister always mistakes for anger. She offered five pieces of advice, anchored by a story about her daughter, who is graduating from kindergarten this year. Advice for a kindergartener, Mattie-Brown suggested, is not so different from advice for a graduating senior: Stay present. Embrace silliness. Say “yes-and.” Pack snacks. Go offline. “Don’t confuse being watched with being known for who you are and what you value by those who matter.”
After Mattie-Brown’s remarks, senior members of the Bromfield Chorus joined the full chorus on the field for a performance of the Bromfield alma mater. Then the Bromfield Jazz Band played “Celebration,” the Kool and the Gang standard, the audience clapping along, a few swaying to the music in their seats.
Student keynote speaker Jacob Dangel, selected by a faculty committee from among seniors who had submitted speeches, set the emotional tone for the class. He was not the valedictorian, he reminded the crowd, nor the salutatorian, and probably not the third most likely person to be standing at the podium. “Our class has been together for so long, I can barely remember a time in my life without my 81 classmates,” he said. “Some of you I’ve even known since you were eating glue in kindergarten. And look at you now—mostly stopped.”
“Bromfield is a bubble,” Dangel said, a closed world comprising 82 students who have known each other since kindergarten, who have witnessed each other’s most embarrassing moments and stayed friends anyway. It was never meant to last, Dangel said. “Bubbles are fun and protective. The one unavoidable thing about them is they eventually pop.” But everything the bubble gave them, the people, the memories, the solid ground, stays with them.
Dangel had a phrase he wanted to leave with his classmates. When faced with something new or frightening, he suggested, consider replying: “Sure, why not.” He led the class through a call-and-response, posing three scenarios: joining a club you know nothing about, dragging yourself to a 9 a.m. lecture in a downpour, and reaching for something you really want but are terrified to try. What do we say, he asked? “Sure, why not,” came the answer. Then he put a final question to his classmates: “Are we ready to graduate?” This time he got the enthusiastic response he was looking for. “Sure, why not.”
In her address, Superintendent Dwight had said that while many adults are still figuring out what AI is, members of the Class of 2026 were already learning how it could shape their future. Valedictorian Anna Selig pressed the point further.
Valedictorian Anna Selig speaks about AI to her classmates. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)
She had watched, she said, as classmates turned increasingly to artificial intelligence to finish assignments in the final stretch of senior year. She did not condemn it, but she cautioned against its use. When students first learn multiplication and long division, she noted, they are not allowed calculators. They work it out themselves. Once they know how, they move on to harder problems, this time with calculators. But the calculator replaces only a small part of what they are doing. The task is still theirs: formulate the process, find the solution, address the larger problem.
AI, she argued, presents a different challenge, because it seems to do everything. Reach for it before mastering the underlying skill, and you cannot evaluate whether what it gives you is right. “We’re not there yet,” she said. Her message was not a warning. It was a case for doing the work first, for earning the tools that will serve you later.
Salutatorian Faith Beckett took a different tack. She opened by listing what she hates: physics, reading and writing, and writing the speech she was delivering. Then she listed what she loves: hard work, cats, despite being allergic to them, and above all, creating. Some in the audience knew her from the mural in the back stairwell, or the disco costumes the Dynamos wore in the school’s production of Mamma Mia. What they didn’t know, she said, was the struggle behind them. Her theme was communication: you don’t need to know everything about a person to treat them with kindness, but you cannot expect people to respond to how you are feeling if you never tell them. This year, she made it a goal to say things out loud. It worked. She closed with a question, and a challenge: Who do you want to see when you look in the mirror?
Salutatorian Faith Beckett encourages communicating with those around you. (Photo by Hannah Taylor)
Now Horton called the class to order for the moment they had been waiting for. She invited school committee chairperson Abigail Besse and Superintendent Dwight to the stage, and welcomed the handful of Harvard Public Schools staff members who were parents of graduates to the stage wings, where they would have the honor of handing a diploma to their own child. Announcer Drew Skrocki took the podium to properly pronounce each of the 82 names. Each student crossed the stage, accepted an empty diploma cover from Dwight, Horton, and Besse, and paused after exiting for a photograph by Press photographer Lisa Aciukewicz before returning to the bleachers. After the ceremony, Horton would be waiting at the class rock with the actual diplomas.
As the last graduate left the stage, the sun, now lower in the western sky, cast a golden light across the assembled families and friends. “We’re getting to the end, team,” Horton said.
Class president Owen Balsis took the microphone, accompanied by his fellow class officers. He asked his classmates to spend the coming days personally thanking every person who had helped make them who they are. He was doing it himself, right then: naming the student government officers, the senior class advisors, the teachers who had stayed late and entertained every idea.
Horton then invited the senior class to rise and move their tassels from right to left. Caps went into the air. A recording of “We Are the People” sent the Class of 2026 on their way, back up the aisle and onto the field.
After the ceremony, Dwight spoke briefly with the Press. Asked what stood out about the class of 2026, she paused. They had always been kind to each other, she said, accepting of one another. She mentioned something else: The class skewed unusually female. When Timothy was younger, she recalled, he had ended up the only boy on an all-girls soccer team. She thought about what had held them together through the years, through the pandemic, through everything. Jacob Dangel’s bubble, she said, was real. “A lot of people cared about them, they all knew each other, they spent a lot of time together. I think that’s a sense of security.”
The Garden Club flowers remained at the entrance, peonies and lupines in the early evening air. The scent of cigar smoke, common in past years, was absent. Athletic Director David Boisvert and a volunteer ferried attendees with limited mobility to their cars in electric golf carts loaned by Shaker Hills. The sun had shifted, casting a shadow across the names of the class of 2026 on the class rock. The graduates lingered on the field with classmates, relatives and well-wishers, some with bouquets or congratulatory balloons in hand, reluctant to depart.
Together for one last time.