A collaboration among Sixth Formers takes stress management strategies global.
June 10, 2024
SPS awards diplomas to 139 Sixth Formers during Graduation Weekend
BY KRISTIN DUISERG
For Sixth Form President Cris Ramirez ’24, it was a journey that started when he joined the St. Paul’s School community as a new Fifth Former in the fall of 2022, sad to leave behind card games with his grandfather, impromptu sleepovers with his cousins and his grandmother’s cooking but excited for all that boarding school had to offer. For many others, it was a journey that started two years earlier under the cloud of COVID-19, with mandatory masks, Zoom chapels and socially distanced classes that international students joined from time zones around the world. On Sunday, June 2, 139 members of the Form of 2024 and their families gathered on Graduation Lawn to honor the end of their journeys as SPS students during an extraordinary few years for the School community and the world at large, and to consider what they will carry with them from Millville to college and beyond.
In her opening remarks, Fourteenth Rector Kathy Giles spoke about the freedoms that college would offer the graduating form and encouraged students to draw on what SPS had taught them about ways to frame their ideas, values and beliefs within expectations when exercising those new freedoms. “Today, as you cross the threshold of our community, I offer you the idea — not new, but worth repeating a final time — that caring matters; that our covenants temper our freedom; and that the covenants that create mutual care, respect and regard ultimately create order, purpose and meaning in our lives,” she said. “Those aren’t givens, but they are much needed.”
Giles underscored the importance of those covenants — defining them as binding promises made between individuals to work toward shared goals — by drawing on the words of several visitors to the School during the academic year. “Perhaps the most intensely personal covenant we have asked you to consider takes the form of our School Prayer,” she said. Noting that the prayer was originally written as an individual charge (“grant that I may never forget to be kind”), Giles explained that when it was rewritten by Fourth Rector Dr. Samuel Drury in the plural, it became an “internal covenant” for the School community as a whole. “Grant us these gifts so that in return, we live good lives, become good people, enjoy the joy of those connections,” she said. “We try and fail and try and fail and try again to live it because we care about each other and our world and our purpose.”
Speaking to his formmates in his capacity as Student Council President, Ramirez evoked the idea of covenants as well, as he described the things that would forever bond them to one another — and not just late nights in Friedman, study sessions in Ohrstrom and long meals in Coit. “What we also share is genuine kindness,” he said. “What makes the people at St. Paul’s so special is that we all embrace this beautiful place and its values … . We’ll walk away with far more than just memories. … This school has taught us how to handle rigor … and the value of hard work and discipline. And most importantly, this school has taught us to be better people.”
Today, as you cross the threshold of our community, I offer you the idea — not new, but worth repeating a final time — that caring matters; that our covenants temper our freedom; and that the covenants that create mutual care, respect and regard ultimately create order, purpose and meaning in our lives.”
— Rector Kathy Giles
Sunday’s Graduation Exercises were the culmination of a weekend of celebrations that started with Halcyon-Shattuck boat races on Saturday morning and included the Classical Honors Program Latin Play, the Graduation Week Awards Ceremony, Baccalaureate, and the Sixth Form Parade from the Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul to Stovell Tennis Center, where graduating students and their families shared dinner. And while there was no shortage of tears among the cheers and hugs as Giles declared the session of 2023-24 closed for the Sixth Form of 2024 and the School’s newest alumni tossed their roses in the air, there also was the palpable sense that the ceremony was a commencement in every sense — the end of their journey as high school students and the beginning of their much longer journey as friends, colleagues and citizen leaders bonded by the covenants forged at SPS.
For a full listing of the academic, athletic and community awards given out during Graduation week, click on the stories below:
Student Achievement Awards »
Athletic Awards and Recognition »
