There have been many days throughout my Masters lifetime where I have truly understood what it means to call ourselves a community.  For example, I remember my first Founder’s Day.  As just a small sixth grader, I was in awe at how passionate high school seniors could be about something an outsider would view as no more than an intramural competition.  I had never seen anything like it at school, students painting their faces and jumping around in celebration-all for a half hours’ worth of tug-of-war. Once I became a high schooler, I was once again shocked by my first Halloween experience.  Students of all grades were so excited to dress up and enjoy the videos they had made.  Days such as these bring us closer together as students and faculty and make Masters more than just a school.

None of these other days can compare to the community feeling provided on MLK Day.  In my previous schools, I had never before had a national holiday treated as anything more than a day off of school, yet here we were not only given the day off but also had another day’s worth of class time devoted to speeches, poems and presentations regarding social justice.  Both the entire student body and the faculty support one another while they reveal extremely personal information, emotion and anecdotes of their experiences with racism and social justice.  It is imperative to understand how lucky it is to be at a school that values social justice enough to dedicate this time towards better understanding it, and that few other schools are committing this time towards understanding issues regarding social justice present and past.  At Masters, we are provided platforms to speak, to share and listen to personal stories and to further educate ourselves in a way arguably more valuable than that of a traditional classroom setting.  Often we judge Masters for its wrongdoings or what it fails to provide us, but on days at Masters such as MLK day, we must remember how special our community is that we encourage students to speak out on issues they believe are prevalent within not only our school but also the world.  So, for all the MLK day celebrations I have been in attendance for I have only one piece of feedback I would like to share with Masters: a thank you.