2026 CONVOCATION SPEECHES

Hello, I am Alison Y. and I am going to be the first speaker today.

I would like to start off by acknowledging the land we are standing on. This land was once home to the Goshute, Paiute, Shoshone, and Ute tribes, and many of them still live here today. I would like to recognize this land which they originally stewarded, along with the plants and animals it sustains.

Next, I am going to talk about this year’s theme: One Campus, One Community. Since we will all be on the same campus this December, now is a great time to reflect on our community values. At its base, a community is just a group of people in the same area with common interests or goals. However, a community like Rowland Hall’s is so much more.

Last year, despite being new to Rowland Hall and knowing barely anyone, I was still welcomed and supported. I was pleasantly surprised by the inclusive and respectful environment, and I hope new students this year feel the same. A large part of why I felt so included was because people were very friendly and went out of their way to include me.

Since we’ll all be on a new campus with new faces from different grades, this is a great time to reach out and meet new people. Along with welcoming new people, the kindness and respect between friends and classmates also makes Rowland Hall such a strong community. Like the ecosystems I learned about in Ms. Mack’s science class last year, we’re all connected. Especially once we’re all on one campus, one act of kindness can go a long way.

Beyond one campus, Rowland Hall is a part of the Salt Lake City community as well. Last year, the seventh-grade class partnered with Seven Canyons Trust to learn about Salt Lake’s waterways and how they all connect and flow into the Great Salt Lake. Even though many of these waterways are unseen, they are still meaningful, like the invisible bonds that tie a community together. We also learned about the daylighting of rivers—uncovering rivers which have been buried. We worked with them to create a mural that will go up in the old baseball stadium to raise awareness for one of Seven Canyons Trust’s next daylighting projects. They will be daylighting a creek under the old parking lot and building a library, fire station, and many other buildings to meet the neighborhood’s needs and bring people together.

This was a very exciting experience, and it was amazing to be a part of something so much larger than myself and Rowland Hall. While we focus mostly on the community just within our school, this is a great example of how we are also a part of the community beyond our campus.

As a final note, I am looking forward to this year and meeting new people with an open mind, and excited for December when we will all be on one campus. Thank you, and have a great school year!

Hello, everybody, I hope you had a great summer. I’m here to kick off the year with a little inspirational speech.

I’m sure you’ve heard that Rowland Hall is getting a new campus.

It’s not just about the new buildings, which obviously are awesome, but it’s also about the kids and adults who make up the amazing community. The people of Rowland Hall are kind and compassionate, and on our campus, we learn to work and have fun together. Everyone here has a unique identity to what they like, how they learn, and how they communicate. With every new and different person, there comes a chance to learn and to teach. As the year goes by, we become a stronger community through the bonds we create.

If you think about it, we are just like a baseball team and our new campus is like the field. Each player has their own specific position but one single player can’t win on their own; they need their teammates’ support to win a game. And you obviously can’t even play a game without a field. That’s kind of like our school. Our school gives us the physical grounds on which we can be our best selves, and to play our best game as a team.

So think of yourselves as part of this Rowland Hall team: One Campus, One Community. We’re all working towards the same goal. We’re all in this together! Play ball!

Thank you for that warm introduction. I want to first thank Ryan Hogland and the whole Rowland Hall community for the opportunity to come speak at this year’s Convocation. When Ryan called and asked if I would give a speech, my first thought was, “Wow, I can’t believe every alumni that has ever attended this school is sick that day, because there’s no chance I’m the first on this call list.” But thankfully, they are, and you’re all stuck with me for the next five to seven minutes.

One Campus, One Community: the theme of this year's Convocation. When I heard this was the theme, a few thoughts came to mind. First, “Wow, they might finally build this thing.” The older folks in the crowd will get that joke. In middle school, my class was told we would be the first class in the new high school. Then we were told we would be the first class to graduate from it. Well, 10 years later, here we are. But they finally did it, and in December, you will become the first students to call the new campus home.

My second thought was, “What in the world am I going to come talk about?” What great wisdom could I come stand up here and pretend like I have any qualification to pass along to you?

By way of introduction, I was a Lifer here, so Rowland Hall played a huge role in shaping who I am today. I participated in Rowmark, soccer, debate, student government, the Head Advisory Committee, and the student ambassador program. I tried my hand in just about everything else here, like robotics and chess, and I was the first and only person in school history to be cut from the men’s basketball team. I wish that was a joke. Apparently my high school strategy was to join enough activities that no one would notice I wasn’t particularly qualified for any of them.

But I was never anything extraordinary. Wasn’t the valedictorian. Didn’t go to an Ivy League school. Wasn’t a Rowmarker who made it to the Olympics. And as I mentioned, my NBA career was over before it even began. So I really hit a writer’s block. That was then I realized that I have no great pieces of wisdom to give you. So thank you for your time and have a great day! [Pretends to walk away.]

No, in all seriousness, I realized that I was trying to pass along the wrong thing. What I wanted to give you was the culture I was fortunate enough to experience here. But culture is not something we simply inherit. It is something we create through participation. Architects and contractors built the new campus. But you will build its community. A campus gives people a place to gather; a community gives them a reason to belong.

I’d like to tell you a couple stories about the community I experienced. When I was in first grade, my friend Carter came up to me and said something along the lines of, “I ski for this team called Rowmark, and we have a bring-a-friend day coming up. Do you want to come?”

I was not an extraordinary skier, but I was curious, so I said yes. I went home, told my parents, and the next thing I knew, I was standing at the top of a hill, staring down at a course full of gates with absolutely no idea what I was doing. But the coaches and athletes supported me. They gave me advice, encouraged me, and helped me navigate an unfamiliar experience.

I fell in love with it. I rushed home afterward and begged my parents to let me join. I signed up, and for roughly the next decade of my life, I spent more than 100 days a year on the snow training and loved nearly every second of it.

That story is not really about skiing. It is about one ordinary invitation that completely changed my life. Without Carter asking that simple question, I would not be the skier I am today. I would not have many of the friends I have, and I would not have seen the world one race trip at a time.

But it was not just Carter who made that experience possible. The athletes and coaches welcomed me once I arrived. They could have assumed that making the new kid feel included was someone else’s responsibility. Instead, each person made a small choice that shaped what Rowland Hall felt like to me. That is how culture is created. It rarely happens through one enormous gesture. It happens through hundreds of ordinary choices that accumulate over time.

The same was true in the classroom. When you spend as many years at one school as I did, your teachers see many different versions of you: the enthusiastic elementary-school version, the awkward middle-school version, and the high-school version who suddenly believes he has everything figured out. The faculty here did far more than teach me the material on a syllabus. They paid attention to who I was becoming.

My fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Button, taught me how to treat my classmates with respect. My middle school French teacher taught me how language can help us understand another culture. Troy, my Rowmark coach, taught me the importance of manners and the immense value of small pleases and thank-yous. Coach Langone taught me how to be a leader on and off the soccer field.

Again and again, faculty members stayed after class, showed up at events, challenged my assumptions, and invested in me as a person. They helped me thrive not by removing every obstacle, but by convincing me that I could work through those obstacles myself. They became trusted mentors, thought partners, and people I was fortunate to consider friends.

It would be easy to hear those stories and conclude that the lesson is simply that Rowland Hall has a great deal to offer you. And it does. But that would miss the most important part of both stories.

Rowmark changed my life because Carter chose to extend an invitation and because a team chose to welcome me. My teachers shaped me because they chose to invest their time, attention, and energy in another person. Everything meaningful that Rowland Hall offered me existed because someone else had decided, consciously or not, to ask, “What can I offer this place and the people in it?” Now that question belongs to you.

That does not mean you need to become student body president, captain every team, or join six activities at once. Trust me, I tried the overcommitted approach. It mostly resulted in a complicated calendar and a massive headache for my mother. She is actually in the audience. Thank you, Mom. I love you. Participation can be much smaller than that. It can mean introducing yourself to someone new. Attending someone else’s event. Asking a thoughtful question in class. Or simply being the person who consistently shows up.

What you offer will not look exactly like what the person next to you offers, and it should not. One Campus, One Community does not mean one personality, one opinion, or one experience. Unity does not require uniformity.

What makes this one community is not that everyone thinks alike. It is that everyone accepts some responsibility for how this place feels to the people around them. A strong community does not ask everyone to become the same; it gives different people a shared place to contribute as themselves.

You will be the first students to occupy the new campus’s four walls. But more importantly, you will be the first students to decide what it feels like to belong there. Years from now, students will enter that campus and assume its culture and traditions have always existed. But many of them will begin with you. With the invitations you extend, the events you attend, the ideas you encourage, and the traditions you begin.

For me, an enormous part of my life began with a first grader asking one simple question: “Would you like to join?” For someone else, that life-changing invitation may come from one of you. 

So I want to leave you with a question: What will this campus become because you were there? The building will be handed to you. What it becomes is up to you. I cannot wait to see the community you create. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone! My name is Chloe Vezina, and I am this year’s student body president. Welcome to Convocation and welcome back to another school year. I am honored to speak to you today, especially because we all know that this year is going to be unlike any other. 
So I want to begin with some questions.

I want everyone to guess, just think to yourself, how many schools in Utah offer a PreK through 12th-grade education? The answer is about 10.

Okay. Now I want everyone to guess how many of those schools have PreK through 12th grade all on one campus? It's about half that, so five.

Finally, I want everyone to guess how many of those schools began on separate campuses, and made the choice to consolidate to one campus. The answer is zero. Not one in all of Utah. So just based on those numbers alone, I think it's already very clear how special our community is.

But I think what's more special, is that we all get to be there when that number moves from zero to one.

As a senior, I’m used to thinking about this year in terms of lasts. After 10 years here, Tuesday was my last first day. Soon, I'll be going to my last dance, my last volleyball game. It’ll be my last time walking the hallways as a student. But this year, there’ll be lasts for everyone. The last assembly in the Larimer Center. The last game of spikeball on the front lawn or soccer on the back field. The last walk up the hill to Convocation.

But while this is my last year at Rowland Hall, it is the first year that our school will be joined into one campus.

I hope that by the end of this year, One Campus, One Community isn’t just something printed on banners or on the inside of the yearbook. I hope it’s something we can actually feel—in the way we look out for each other, in the way we adapt, and in the way we build something new. 
Because eventually, the new buildings won’t be new anymore. The move will become something we barely remember. By 2035, this year’s fourth graders will be walking across the graduation stage the same year current kindergarteners will start high school as freshmen. Second and third graders will be getting their permits and learning to drive, while fifth and sixth graders will already be off in college or beyond.

I bet that makes everyone here feel really old. I know I do.

What I hope we remember is not the change, but instead the choice to make something of it. Because we, as in every person in this field, are responsible for shaping the foundation of Rowland Hall as one campus for future generations to come.

So enjoy the lasts. Be nostalgic, reminisce, say goodbyes. But embrace the firsts. Not just the new class schedule, but branch out. Talk to someone you don’t know. Try something new. Change is inevitable, but we are fortunate to be able to go through this change together.

Because someday, the first graders sitting right here in front of me will be the seniors standing where we are now. And when that day comes, I hope they remember that they weren’t just present when we started as one campus—they were part of the first community that built it. We all are.

This year is going to be about building bridges. Closing gaps. And so let's start with one of my favorite traditions.

First graders, in a second, please stand and line up to high-five the seniors. You will face the stage and stay in your place. Seniors, once the first graders have lined up, please stand and line up to high-five them. You will move through the line.

Thank you, everyone, and have an amazing school year.