Photo: What’s more traditional at a graduation than plenty of caps sent upwards? 

The final act of the Belmont High School Class of 2026 occurred on the stage of Harris Field on Saturday, June 6, before an audience of parents, siblings, relatives, friends, teachers, and a gaggle of photographers that would not seem out of place at a Hollywood premiere.

The class gathered under partly cloudy skies with temperatures a bit in the uncomfortable range. But any hint of rain was pushed back to that night, allowing students and guests to enjoy the pageantry of graduation. The High School’s Wind Symphony under Alley Lacasse and Combined Chorus conducted by Kaitlin Donovan served as artistic accompaniment. 

The school committee and members of the school administration, led by Superintendent Dr. Jill Geiser and Committee Chair Meghan Moriarty, marched in front of the students before taking their places on the dais. 

Belmont High School Principal Issac Taylor

In his welcoming remarks, Belmont High School Principal Isaac Taylor recalled that in the late 1960s, the technically-based race to the moon and the environmental movement ran in parallel only to see each sidelined for decades. Today, while interplanetary space exploration “is back on the table” as the idea “supporting life in barren environments charges the imagination … and spurs us to think big, shared dreams for humanity.” Yet there is no similar effort to “re-engineer our planet, turn the solar system green.

“Can it be that we can take on the technical and logistic challenges of planting life in air and dusty worlds, yet fall into a nihilistic stupor when it comes to repairing our own beautiful home, even where we have the knowledge and the means to do so?” asked Taylor. 

And while today magical thinking dominates our collective consciousness, a “techno-authoritarian view of the future, devoid of community and empathy, is settling over humanity like obnoxious gas as tensions rise and hope fades,” he said.

“It is darkly fascinating that the same wealthy elite can be so optimistic about our prospect of multi-planetary species with complex space-centered heavy industry, while at the same time denying agency for solving our climate crisis, inequality, and biodiversity dilemma,” he said. 

“But this is not the only future,” said Taylor. In the past four years, the Belmont High Class of 2026 had demonstrated the possibilities of humanity, having stamped their mark upon the new high school campus by inventing and cementing traditions, such as hosting the largest prom in the state, establishing the first mini forest in Belmont, and creating such viral Instagram reels on the class account with two million views.

“Class of 2026, you are graduating at a time when you will see big changes in the world, no matter what. There is no possibility of things staying the same. In an era of grievances of people and defeatism, our greatest resource and our greatest hope are all of you. I know that you have the skills to be engaged citizens, empathetic people, and creative and imaginative thinkers—everything you need to effect change.”

Class President Ignacio ‘Iggy’ Matorras

From a student who was “too scared” to run for student government as a first year to addressing the approximately 370 members of the Class of 2026 as its student government president, Ignacio ‘Iggy’ Matorras remains surprised that someone who was so nervous during his first campaign speech that he read a paragraph twice would be speaking for his classmates.

“Somehow I still won the election, and this role had a tremendous impact on my life,” said Matorras, forcing him to speak and working with others and finding solutions to problems on the fly. 

“Most importantly, it showed me that some of the best opportunities in life come to you when you’re willing to do something that scares you.”

Michelle Chow, School Committee Award for Outstanding Achievement in Scholarship

Recognized for her integrity and outstanding academic activities, Michelle Chow will matriculate this fall at Cornell, studying engineering. 

“A wise man taught me what it means to be part of a thriving community,” Chow told the graduating class. “He brought people together by being present in ordinary ways, showing up with a smile, greeting people, asking how they were doing, laughing with them, talking to them. His seemingly simple actions had a large impact, making everyone feel like they belonged, and so I realized that community is born through the unremarkable moments that become the thread weaving us together.”

The change of the members of the Class of 2026, from being “average freshmen” to graduating seniors, was not simply because “we became more mature, more experienced, and more accustomed to the rhythm of high school.” Rather, it’s because through our day-to-day interactions, we’ve created an extraordinary sense of unity,” Chow said, from shared classes, clubs, field trips, and senior year activities which “weren’t just a source of entertainment, they were also a reminder of having gone through high school as a class rather than simply as individuals.”

“While today marks the end of our journey at BHS, the legacy of our time here will live on through the memory of the distinct and special community we’ve built,” said Chow. “We each have our own stories, our own backgrounds, our own lives, like diverse patches of fabric, but through the time we spent together, we’ve managed to stitch together a beautiful quilt.”

Fiona Rodriguez-Clark, School Committee Award for Outstanding Achievement in Scholarship

Early in the lacrosse season, in which she was a co-captain and senior leader of a very young defensive backline, Fiona Rodriguez-Clark rushed off the pitch just before halftime and sprinted to the high school. It wasn’t any sort of emergency. It was a concert. Rodriguez-Clark was scheduled to play with the school’s orchestra. The question about Rodriguez is what she hasn’t accomplished in her four years at BHS: a perfect 4.33 GPA, National Merit Scholar Letter of Commendation, AP Scholar with Distinction, co-founder and president of the mental health initiative Morgan’s Message, playing cello with the Boston Philharmonic and a three-time All-State musician, a volunteer with her church in serving the unhoused community. She will take her boundless energy to Penn in the fall, studying mathematics.

With so much done on her resume, Rodriguez-Clark said she wished to talk about what the future held for her and her classmates. It’s a question that everyone has been asked for much of their lives—Rodriguez-Clark was four when she saw a future as a dentist – and which has changed up until the current vision of yourself, where the future is “concrete to vague.”

In a clever moment, Rodriguez-Clark asked her classmates to reach under their chairs where she placed slips of paper with occupations and accomplishments such as two-time BAA Marathon wheelchair champ, NASA astronaut, population ecologist for the National Zoo, a nanny, a US Marine major, and Empress of Japan.

Rodriguez-Clark told the assembled that she wasn’t the class Cassandra, rather that each of the 340 slips were people who are Belmont High School graduates.

“The important thing is that at one point in all of these people’s lives, the dream written on that piece of paper before you was only that, a dream. Conjure up that image of your own future again. Like all of us graduating today, these people started with only an idea of what they wanted their futures to look like, but as soon as they walked across this stage, it was time to start making those futures a reality.”

“At this point, you can either accept the futures that other people choose for you, or you can strive to create your own. No one lives your life but you, and only you know what it’s like to be in your shoes at this moment.”

“This future is yours, and this future is now.”