We’ve made it. We’ve completed another year of the quintessential American teenage experience: public high school. From Mean Girls to High School Musical where stereotypes are dressed up in mini skirts and headbands, and conflict is solved through song, our imaginations might have run a little wild about what goes on in locker-lined halls. Of course it is over the top, and yet, some of it has turned out to contain a semblance of truth. Yes, high school can be a time with easy fun, cheering at football games, dancing in the quad at Homecoming, and the occasional petty cliché. But just like the things we do can’t define who we are, the events we experience here at Campo are never the full story.

We are a community first and foremost built of people who choose to overturn the clichés and create lasting foundations, whether in sports, arts, or academics, for the cougars to come. We are a community that cares deeply about the culture being cultivated as we grow up together. Culture can have a lot of connotations and at Campo it is often accompanied by buzz-words like burnout and competition. However, most of us don’t want to gradually become shells as we turn on auto-pilot and race up the Moraga hills without pausing for breath. I also think that many of us have and are actively trying to develop, for ourselves, our peers, and our staff, an environment at Campo to call home – at least for a little while.

So, what does home look like? What does the place we come to at 8:30 each morning for ten months out of the year look like? We are used to going places, doing things – great things even – and accumulating the accolades. Students break Track & Field records, win creative arts awards, and perform on renowned stages.

At the end of it all we return here to high school, hopefully carrying what we’ve learned from the world outside of it. And as we continue to walk and laugh and cry through the halls together it turns out we each just want our chance to fly.

To get there — and I mean to fly, really fly — requires remembering the reasons we wanted to in the first place. It requires time, grace, patience, courage, and wisdom. It requires calling to our imaginations the child in all of us who was able to spot dragons in the clouds, ask a question with each movement of the wind, and find wonder among the stars.