KENT – The impact of the Covid pandemic encouraged adapting to change. This is how Kent School senior prefect Robert “Robby” F. Ober IV shared his memories of their experience during his address to his graduating class June 2.
When the Class of 2024 started on the Kent School campus four years ago, they had a new Head of School, Michael Hirschfeld, as the school’s leader.
“We’ve learned a lot from the life we’ve lived over the last four years. What sets our class apart is we’ve had to learn to adapt to change that has been sudden and at lightning speed,” Ober said. “Our first year began with a pandemic that completely altered what others had experienced at Kent.” He reminded them of the masks, not being able to walk into town, standing six feet apart from each other in lunch lines, paper containers and plastic flatware and the introduction of Zoom that allowed them to have class without actually being in the classroom.
“I can recall sitting down with a friend at lunch with what appeared to be bulletproof glass separating us from each other,” Ober said and was greeted by laughter. “Or how about those Covid tests where they would shove long cotton swap sticks up our noses for almost 30 seconds until your eyes started watering? Or how about that teacher that used a hand-cut yardstick to make sure we were social distancing ourselves?”
While his class experienced a lot during that time, he said their experiences didn’t compare to previous Kent School students at times of WWI and the pandemic of 1918.
“Recently I spent some time looking through the old Kent News of 1918,” he shared, noting there were several stories that piqued his interest including a school nurse who died while tending boys suffering from influenza, and the story of Archie Ring, a local farmer who provided food for the school. He got sick from influenza and 50 Kent boys went to work on the farm to make sure food showed up on the tables in the dining hall.
“I share these stories to place our experience in a wider historical context. Yes, we struggled. Although we didn’t go off to war like the Class of 1919, our class learned to endure through countless changes. We also learned to adapt to the change,” Ober said.
It made the class more unified and stronger, he said. It also taught them to be resilient and nimble.
Ober was presented with the Headmaster’s Cup award, which honors the sixth form boy who has shown the most devotion and interest in the school.
His fellow Senior Prefect Dymond Johnson also addressed the graduates, saying how much the class has grown together and that she was so proud of her classmates. “Whatever the next step in our lives may be, we will take a piece of Kent with us because that is how important it is,” Johnson said.
During a ceremony held under a large tent erected in front of the Head of School’s home on Macedonia Road, 147 students graduated from the independent school as part of the 117th graduation.
Hirschfeld introduced the graduation speaker, Shabana Basij-Rasikh, who co-founded and is the president of the School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA), which is the only boarding school for Afghan girls in the world. He encouraged the graduates to take note that she “founded SOLA when she was just a few months older than you and perhaps younger than some of you.”
“We are lucky in the span of our lives if we get to meet a visionary, someone so doggedly committed and singularly focused on improving the human condition that their example inspires us to do the same,” Hirschfeld said. “Equally rare in a lifetime is an encounter with a true hero.”
Basij-Rasikh called the graduation day one to believe in the future. She brought listeners back to a day almost three years earlier when the future seemed impossible to imagine. In August 2021, her home city Kabul had fallen to the Taliban. She was at the airport trying to escape and bring her students with her.
“I remember the darkness and the sadness—the horror of everything happening around me,” she said. At that exact time, she received an email from Hirschfeld with a subject line “What can I do to help?” The one email brought about so many partnerships between SOLA and other organizations worldwide, including Kent School. Basij-Rasikh said it was important for her to take the opportunity to publicly thank her good friend, Mike Hirschfeld. This was greeted with thunderous applause.
She left her own graduation from Middlebury College 13 years ago with a mission to help Afghan girls create the best generation of educated women in the country’s history.
“They are the ones who will help rebuild Afghanistan. They are the ones whose fire will drive away the darkness that has settled on my homeland,” Basij-Rasikh said. While she acknowledged that her mission might be different from the graduates, she thought her motivation might ring true for them.
“My motivation is to seek knowledge even to the ends of the earth. That is a phrase that Muslims will be familiar with. It comes from one of the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed,” she said. “I see it as a call to action in our lives and the lives of others.”
The educational needs of girls is great. Her school has received 2,000 applications for the 30 available spots for SOLA that is now located in Rwanda. This year they are launching an online academy to be able to reach more students.
Two of the Kent School graduates came all the way from Afghanistan. “That is a beautiful thing to say,” Basij-Rasikh said. Due to privacy issues, the girls were not publicly identified.
She shared her personal story of having to pretend to be a boy as a child in order to attend underground schools in Afghanistan. She also detailed the oppression that Afghan women must endure now under the Taliban.
She implored the graduates to use their compassion and confidence.
“Lift our world to a better place,” Basij-Rasikh said.
Class of 2024 local graduates
Kent School graduates who are Kent residents:
Samuel C. Booth, who will attend the University of St. Andrews
Nicholas Chavka, who will attend Marist College
Morgan Ashley Clarke, who will attend Hamilton College
Marra Elsesser, who will attend the University of New Haven
Hank Hannan, who will attend the University of New England
Jack Horgan, who will attend Syracuse University
Lanna May Kennedy, who will attend the University of Vermont
William Blanchard Kirkiles, who will attend Brown University
Robert F. Ober IV, who will attend Colby College
Sophia Rousseau, who will attend Quinnipiac University
Lily Wang, who will attend Washington University in St. Louis
