On September 14, Form VI president Charlie Rubel ’27 delivered an opening address in Hamilton Chapel. After some opening remarks from Mr. Schneider, Charlie centered his speech on a single theme: community. Community was a common theme he had traced throughout his experiences at Belmont Hill, which he defined as “the shared experience of both successes and failures,” and he traced it over the four years of those experiences.
Looking back on his good memories at BH, Charlie noted the epic baseball comeback against St. Mark’s last year. He observed the power of the Loop at hockey games, the hype of when a friend starts “ripping it up in the B-Flats,” and an idea raised in a Harkness discussion that is elevated by another student.
But, as he remarked, when times get tough, that is when community shines at BH. Charlie recognized that the closest he had seen BH students occurred when one of them had lost a loved one.
Charlie moved on to discussing how community means different things for everyone: “A senior is writing their college application essay. A 7th grader is exploring how many cookies they can fit in one hand.” But the community he loves to see is the one formed by the relationships between students and faculty.
Addressing each form individually, he advised the seniors to connect with one another as much as possible in their last year. To the ninth graders, he stated that they should be leaders of the lower school. To the seventh graders, especially his “boy Bobby Sullivan ’31”, he told them that the BH community is here for them, all 470 of us.
Charlie closed out his speech by tying it back to his core message: “[Belmont Hill] has been, and will always be, a place you can call home, with 470 brothers just a call away, no matter your situation.”
As students filed out of Hamilton Chapel, Charlie’s message offered a fitting start to the new school year. Charlie reminded the school that community at Belmont Hill isn’t built in a single assembly but in the everyday choices students make to show up for one another. For everyone, from the Form VI kids in the front to the Form I students sitting above, the speech was a reminder of what the year ahead could hold, and of the responsibility each of them shares in making it so.
