The Rivers School admission season has come to a successful close, reaching milestones unprecedented in the school’s 115-year history. The office of admission and financial aid reported record-breaking yield rates, lower admission rates, and unparalleled growth and diversity in Rivers’ incoming student body.

There are numerous lenses through which to view the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Last Friday at Rivers, there were at least 24 such lenses as students took the reins and led a series of workshops designed to augment, amplify, and support this year’s DEI theme, “Engaging Across Differences.”

For nearly 30 years, the Day of Silence, observed on the second Friday in April, has served as a way for members of the LGBTQ+ community to draw attention to their historical silencing—and to declare that that silencing is no longer acceptable. Participants refrain from speaking for the day, reflecting the many ways in which the voices of community members go unheard.

As much of the U.S. experienced a solar eclipse earlier this week, students, faculty, and other members of the Rivers community gathered on the Lank Family Quadrangle to witness this phenomenon. With eyes safely protected by special eclipse-viewing glasses, attendees were able to take in the sight of the sun gradually slipping out of sight—or 93 percent of the way there, at least. The eerie pall and the sudden drop in temperature lasted just long enough to remind everyone present of the beauty and power of this rare natural occurrence.

Spring is in the air, which means it’s time for winter sports awards to be announced. The Independent School League and NEPSAC awards, along with other forms of seasonal athletic recognition, were recently announced, and 31 Rivers athletes were honored. Coming on top of a great showing in the playoffs, including a finals appearance for boys’ hockey and a boys’ basketball championship, it was a successful season for Red Wings. Here’s a complete list of individual awards, and congratulations to all the winners!

Visual art and writing have always been serious pursuits at The Rivers School. Under the guidance of dedicated faculty members, students have the opportunity to express themselves creatively in a range of media throughout their years at Rivers. That creativity was recognized recently when the Massachusetts results of the annual Scholastic Art & Writing Awards competition were announced. Forty-three works of visual art by Rivers students were honored, and 12 works garnered awards in the writing categories.

English faculty member Mary Mertsch describes the Grade 9 Honors English Seminar’s Living Library event as “a sort of haunted house experience, but with books.” It’s an apt description: On Monday, as this year’s event unfolded, Haynes classrooms were converted into environments that ranged from spooky to gothic to dystopian to fantastical and beyond, each evoking a book that the students had read and analyzed in class.

After March break, the professional community came back for a full day of connection and learning. Gathering in Kraft Dining Hall on Monday, March 25, colleagues happily greeted one another and shared stories of their adventures away. For some, the break was a chance to reconnect with families and friends, while others accompanied students on trips to Italy, Greece, and Cuba. For many members of the professional community, work continued on campus and served as a time to prepare for the final stretch of the year.

The Rivers Big Band, joined by members of Honors Big Band and Select 2 Combo, recently returned from a whirlwind cultural, historical, and musical tour of Cuba. While Rivers has offered travel programs with a music focus in the past, this is the first year a Rivers group has traveled to Cuba, with 21 students from the Rivers Honors Big Band participating in the trip, along with around 15 students from the Noble and Greenough School’s jazz band. Students took in the vibrant arts scene of music and art, playing and recording Cuban music with local conservatory students, learning and playing with master teachers and recording artists, visiting important cultural sites, and creating lasting intercultural friendships and partnerships.

If you’ve been to a performance of one of The Rivers School’s jazz ensembles in the last few years, it’s likely you’ve seen Ethan Kasparian Weisman ’24. A multi-instrumentalist from a young age, he has participated in the National YoungArts Competition twice—once for saxophone and most recently for clarinet, for which he was invited to National YoungArts Week in January with peers throughout the country. As a senior, his performance qualified him to be nominated as a 2024 US Presidential Scholar in the Arts, one of 60 nominees to earn this prestigious distinction, and one of the nation’s highest honors for high school students who exemplify artistic and academic excellence. We recently sat down with Kasparian Weisman to talk about his musical journey and recent successes.

This is the first year that the Equity and Engagement Department has been reorganized and expanded to oversee DEI, community engagement, and global education under new director Jenny Jun-lei Kravitz, but the impact is already being felt throughout the school, with enhanced programming, a sweeping vision, and an emphasis on the kind of environment and community Rivers values.

Climate change can seem like an intractable challenge—but not to Grade 7 students at Rivers. For Sustainability Night, which took place just before spring break, the focus is on solutions, and the students dove in with aplomb, coming up with creative suggestions ranging from rooftop gardens to 3D-printed devices to air-filter drones to stratospheric aerosol injection planes.

Evan Coleman ’05 says he was so quiet and shy while at Rivers that his yearbook superlative jokingly suggested that he’d be most likely to become a motivational speaker. So, he told a group of students and professional community members in a Revers classroom on Tuesday, there was a bit of irony in finding himself back on campus in something like that very role.

Sonia Nazario, this year’s Hall Family Speaker, says she was “born a rabble-rouser.” Her childhood nickname was “the troublemaker,” and the award-winning journalist, author, and activist still has a nose for trouble—good trouble.

It was a busy week for the Red Wings, as Rivers was one of only two schools in New England to have all four teams (boys’ and girls’ hockey and basketball) qualify for NEPSAC postseason play.

Senior year can be a stressful time, but Rivers seniors can feel good about their recent accomplishments: 100% of the school’s 93 seniors have received an offer of college admission, and, with ED2 now in, 65% are enrolled. These results, said Director of College Counseling Dave Lyons ’99, P’30, reinforce the college office’s approach of preparing students to engage with early admission rounds whenever these practices align with the colleges on their lists.

Four Broadway stars walk into a tense PTA meeting at a high school in Indiana, where a gay teen has been excluded from attending her prom by the town’s small-minded PTA leadership. The stars are in desperate need of a cause and some rebranding, and the student—well, she just wants to attend her prom with her girlfriend like any other student, yet finds herself in a crossfire of egos, town values, social pressure, and media coverage. Thus the scene is set for Rivers’ winter musical, The Prom, performed by the Nonesuch Players. The large ensemble cast, production team, and pit orchestra delighted the audience with the magic of show business, delivering big choreographed numbers, comedic timing, talented acting and singing, and a powerful, uplifting story of love and acceptance (and many, many sequins!).

Behind every immigrant, there’s a story. At last Friday’s Upper School assembly—the second session of programming created around this year’s DEI theme, Engaging Across Differences—attendees had a chance to hear immigration stories from a perhaps-unexpected quarter: Members of Rivers’ professional community who are themselves immigrants or who have close ties to the immigrant experience.

The Rivers School held an evening event for parents and caregivers, “Community and Connection: A State of the School Update,” on Wednesday, February 7, providing an overview through a range of lenses: strategy, governance, finance, development, academics, and more. The speakers painted a picture of an institution on an upward trajectory, building on the momentum of Head of School Ryan S. Dahlem’s first six months at the helm.

This past Sunday, February 11, Grade 10 students had a chance to learn just what makes Special Olympics so special. As it has for many years, the grade hosted a Special Olympics of Massachusetts basketball tournament on the Rivers campus, with athletes from all over the state taking to the floor in Benson Gymnasium.

Tera Kull ’03 is no stranger to the lemonade-from-lemons process. Kull, who has a long track record of turning challenges into opportunities, shared her story on Tuesday, February 6, at this year’s inaugural Alum Speaker Series event. The lunchtime event showcases the efforts and accomplishments of Rivers graduates who are actively engaged in their communities and working to uplift social justice values.

More wide-ranging than a talent show, more inclusive than a polished concert, more improvisatory than a play or musical, the Rivers Coffeehouse is a place where anyone can take to the stage and receive a warm response. From first-timers to old hands, from nervous ninth graders to fun-loving faculty members, everyone in the Rivers community is welcome in the Black Box theater three times a year, and while the event itself can be freewheeling and unpredictable, a supportive audience cheering for every performer is guaranteed.

Late January was a great time to be a Red Wing! We’ve passed the halfway point in the winter season, and Rivers athletes are going strong.

No one seems more surprised about Brad Belin ’03’s career trajectory than Belin himself. Looking back on his years at Rivers, Belin—the most recent recipient of the school’s Young Alumni Achievement Award—says, “I wasn’t a model student or necessarily someone who thought of school as a place for education. School was a convenient place to play sports and hang out with friends.”

There are countless places the study of math might lead. On a recent rainy Wednesday morning, it led a group of Rivers students to Gillette Stadium, where the current cohort of McCartney Scholars met with members of the Kraft Analytics Group (KAGR) to learn about the use of data science in the sports and entertainment industries.

Eight delegates from Rivers Model UN, along with faculty advisor Arturo Bagley and faculty member Robin Sallie, traveled to New York City last weekend to attend the CMUNCE conference at Columbia University, which ran from Thursday through Sunday. In addition to spending many hours in committee sessions as part of the conference, participants also visited the Spanish mission to the United Nations and attended symposia featuring panels and interviews with UN personnel on Columbia’s campus, taking full advantage of its proximity to the UN Headquarters in midtown Manhattan.

As Carnegie Hall is to music, Boston’s TD Garden—with its fabled parquet floor—is to basketball. And on Sunday, January 14, Rivers basketball players lived out a dream by participating in the Andrew James Lawson Foundation Invitational at the Garden.

Joan Hall, this year’s visiting artist at The Rivers School, grew up in Ohio and never saw the ocean until she was in graduate school. But, as she shared with students at an Upper School assembly on Tuesday, the ocean—its beauty, its fragility, and the environmental threats it faces—has been the subject of her art for decades.

The national holiday that commemorates the birthday of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. falls on the third Monday in January. But at Rivers, it is observed on the second Monday of the month, in an all-school assembly that serves to inspire the community and remind them of King’s legacy.

Climbing Antarctica’s highest peak—where average temperatures hover around -20F and base camp is reached by taking two unusual flights from Punta Arenas, Chile’s southernmost point—might not be everyone’s idea of a good time. But for Head of School Ryan Dahlem, who scaled the Vinson Massif years ago with a team that included his father, John, the challenges of the climb were part of what made it a life-changing experience for him.

It’s not unusual for middle school students to learn about the water cycle: Evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and so on. But at Rivers, students in Grade 6 Humanities go way beyond that to a broader “water cycle” that studies humanity’s relationship to water, both past and present, and looks at the role of water in global conflicts, power struggles, and opportunities.

ChatGPT appeared on Michael Schlenker’s radar last November, when it first became available to the public. The Rivers science faculty member reports, “A student who had taken my AP computer science course the year before said, ‘Hey, Mr. Schlenker, have you checked out ChatGPT yet?’ And I said, ‘No. Have you?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I just asked it to write my video game project from last year.’”