Good News Is Gospill

I showed up at East High’s commencement ceremony at the Denver Coliseum earlier this week, expecting to simply endure it for the sake of my darling niece.

We’ll get two hours of a snoozy superintendent droning about bright futures, some halting student speeches, and a red sea of newly minted adults smuggling shooters under their gowns. I’d done this before. I knew the drill.

Instead, I got a full episode of “Glee.”

East High School’s 150th commencement ceremony filled the venue with a tight orchestra, a genuinely delightful senior choir, and some of the most powerful speeches I’ve ever heard from people who are still, technically, children. Scarlet caps and gowns flowed onto the Coliseum floor, orderly and bright against a wet, grey May day — 616 graduates, including my sparkly, high-energy, can-do/will-do niece — and they proceeded to completely dismantle my expectations.

East has been doing this for 150 years. Actress Pam Grier walked the same halls as our young Angie. The school has always had a knack for turning out people who go into the world and make noise.

But nothing about this day felt like legacy or tradition for its own sake. It felt alive.

The highlights, for me, were three refugee students who each took the mic and spoke with extraordinary eloquence about their journeys to Denver — one from Venezuela, one from Malaysia, one from Ethiopia. Each described the fear, the language barriers, the exhausting feeling of being so far behind their classmates from day one. And each described, with quiet gratitude, how their community of peers and teachers was always there to reach back and pull them forward.

I’ll confess: as they spoke, I found myself glancing toward the exits, quietly wondering whether ICE agents were posted outside. That’s where we are right now. But inside the Coliseum, you’d never know it. These kids were focused entirely on each other.

Then the principal spoke. Droll, great with dramatic pauses and a wink, she was clearly born for the role. She said what she’ll remember most about the Class of ’26 is that they’re KIND. After four years of watching this particular class, she’d found these kids to be genuinely, remarkably kind to one another. Not performatively. Not for show. Just as a way of operating in the world.

I always assumed my niece was an anomaly. Apparently, she is one of 616.

It made me think about what was happening the same night, just 60 miles south in Colorado Springs. At Palmer High’s commencement, graduates protested District 11’s decision to separate high-achieving students from the rest of the class during ceremonies. Those kids pushed back, smuggling in their “regular” regalia.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence or a fluke. It’s the same instinct I saw in Denver — inclusion over exclusion. The insistence that we cross the finish line together, or the finish line doesn’t mean much.

These kids, north and south, seem to understand something a lot of adults have forgotten: that sorting people by worth, by achievement, by who’s ahead and who’s behind — that’s not how you build something that lasts. Community is the whole point. And maybe, after everything this generation has been through, they’re the ones who understand that most clearly.

They’ve been through a lot.

East High has lived through not one but two school shootings in the past four years. Students have been drilled — literally drilled — to hide safely, to work together, to reach back for the person next to them in the dark. It reminds me of what people say about soldiers who serve together: there’s a shared trauma, a specific kind of bond that outsiders can’t quite access.

They made it through because they made it through together. Maybe that’s where the kindness comes from. Not from a poster on a wall, but from actual experience — the knowledge that the person beside you might be all you’ve got.

I’ve been pretty dim about the future lately. It’s not hard to be. But sitting in that Coliseum, watching 616 kids who have every reason to be hardened and scared, and finding them instead luminous and kind and fiercely devoted to one another

—

Maybe we’ll all be alright.