Celebrating Our Seniors

The Hathaway Brown Class of 2020 receives a memorable send-off.

In typical HB fashion, people from across our school family—students, faculty, administrators, board members, parents, alumnae, and friends—came together on May 29 to create a fantastic Virtual Commencement celebration for our newest Hathaway Brown graduates, the Class of 2020.

The ceremony included traditional remarks from Head of School Fran Biselle, and beautiful portraits of each graduate created by Kimberly Ponsky Sable ’98 were displayed onscreen while Director of Upper School Hallie Ritzman read each of the students’ names. HB mom Catherine Herrick Levy ’93, President of the Hathaway Brown Alumnae Association, issued a moving Alumnae Charge and welcomed the graduates to the incredible alumnae sisterhood that began in 1876. We closed the ceremony with a socially distanced clap-out, and faculty and administrators symbolically launched the class off into their future.

We also surprised the graduates with well wishes sent in from all around the world, with congratulatory messages from teachers, board members, and other dignitaries including Billie Jean King, Eva Schloss, and Gloria Steinem; journalists Russ Mitchell, Danita Harris, Connie Schultz, Geraldo Rivera, Norah O’Donnell, Sharyn Alfonsi, and Scott Pelley; musicians Franz Welser-Möst, Jason Mraz, and Mark Foster; politicians Ohio Lt. Gov. Jon Husted and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown; literary stars Sarah Kay and John Irving; chefs Doug Katz and Michael Symon; hit Netflix show directors Keiann Collins and Juanesta Holmes; Broadway actor Chris McCarrell; Cleveland Museum of Art director William Griswold; and Cleveland Cavaliers GM Koby Altman and assistant coach Lindsay Gottlieb. Later that week, the students received video well-wishes from several current and former Cleveland Browns players and coaches as well. Watch the ceremony and special tribute video at HB.edu/Commencement2020.

An Excerpt From The Student Remarks Delivered By Anya Razmi ’20:

“Any kind memory of these halls can be boiled down to this: good people. Good people in a good place. And somehow, by the time all these infinitesimal moments had been strung together, we had grown up.

Anya Razmi ’20

We’ve grown up. We’ve grown up together. Twenty of us have known each other since we were five. All of us have known each other for some of the most transformative years of our lives. There’s an intimacy to growing up the way we did: side by side. We know each other in a way our college friends never will. In a way our future coworkers never will. We are bound, not by hometown or high school, but by the perpetual ways in which we changed each other. In these past few months, our lives have unspooled. This virus has come and unraveled us, with sudden and deadly precision, and with uncertainty comes the very human need to cling to the familiar. For us, the familiar and good: our halls, our teachers, our friends. Rushed banter between bells has been replaced by text messages; conversations with teachers during frees substituted for idle discussions during office hours. I thought I would stand here and talk about painting my cheeks silver for Homecoming or virtual Carnival, but the truth is what I miss the most is the ordinary. One of my friends joked over text the other day that she would gladly take another physics test, and in some ways, I can’t help but feel the same.

When we pictured senior year, we pictured it in its completion: doused in chlorine from the pool jump, pressed clean and white on a sunlit graduation. What we lost was not just Prom or College T-Shirt Day, but rather a month with the students and the teachers and the people we love. A month of saying slow goodbyes, where we could look closer and hug harder and cherish more. When I think back to that last Thursday, I think about this the most: how I would have acted, knowing it was well and truly our last time on campus as a senior class. But the truth is—the hard truth is—we were always going to have a last day, and we were always going to lose this school. The pain of this goodbye is visceral and valid. Yet I know that we have made the very best of our four years here. And I’m talking to a camera instead of an audience. But if we could have a normal graduation, and if I could choose any group of people in the world to have by my side, diploma in hand, I would choose this class of 85 a thousand times over.

There will be a day when we no longer remember gossiping in the Writing Center or ranting in the Senior Room or how very long this month apart has felt. But the greater truth is this: The things that matter last. The friends we have made here—the teachers we have learned from—and, above all, the people we have become—these are the everlasting things we will carry. They are the permanency of this place.”

No matter where she goes from here, HB is always home.

Class of 2020 College Destinations:

Belmont University Boston College Boston University (2) Bucknell University Carnegie Mellon

University Case Western Reserve

University (2) Clemson University Colby College Columbia University Cornell University Dartmouth College Davidson College Denison University (2) Dickinson College Duke University Elon University (2) Emory University (2)

Goucher College Ohio Wesleyan Harvard University (2) University Hope College Rice University Ithaca College Rochester Institute Kent State of Technology

University (2) Saint Louis University Kenyon College Skidmore College Lehigh University Spelman College Loyola Marymount Stanford University

University Swarthmore College Massachusetts Institute Syracuse University (2) of Technology (2) Tufts University McMaster University Tulane University Miami University University of Akron New York University (3) University of California, Northeastern Los Angeles

University (2) University of Cincinnati Oberlin College University of Dayton The Ohio State University of Denver

University (6)

Learn more at hb.edu/BestGirlsSchool

University of Illinois at

Urbana-Champaign University of Miami (2) University of Michigan (4) University of

Pennsylvania (2) University of Pittsburgh University of

South Carolina (2) University of Southern

California (2) University of the

South, Sewanee University of Virginia University of

Washington Vanderbilt University Yale University (2) As of 5/26/20

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