By Victoria Dolan

[This the text of the salutatorian’s address delivered at Hull High’s graduation ceremonies on June 1 by Victoria Dolan – Ed.]

Good morning parents, faculty, staff, honored guests, and thank you for joining us to celebrate my fellow members of the class of 2024. I’d especially like to thank all of our wonderful teachers who helped us make it to this moment, and to my parents, grandma, and sister, who listened to me complain for four years about all the homework those wonderful teachers assigned.

As many of my peers already know, I moved to Hull from across the country in sixth grade. I didn’t know anybody, and as I looked into the future, I was excited to join this community, but also incredibly nervous about what this new setting would bring. Many of you may be feeling similarly now as you prepare to move into a new community – for a job, or college, or trade school.

My third day of school, I got lucky. Shocked to learn I had never made slime before, Cali Gibbons invited me to her house to learn how. I failed, miserably, at it, but made a new friend in the process.

You see, my favorite thing about Hull and our time at Hull High is precisely what I experienced on that day with Cali. Cali represented the best characteristics of Hull’s close-knit community – one that is protective of its own while kind to outsiders, and always overwhelmingly generous.

We’ve seen that community in action time and time again over the past four years. Packing the stands at cold and windy football games until we made it to Gillette for the first time in decades. Rallying around our gift-card fundraisers that relied on local businesses to help bring prom tickets to unprecedentedly low prices. Filling the seats of the auditorium for a 40-minute play, or the gym bleachers for the students-versus-faculty basketball game.

But despite these successes, it is no secret that the past four years have been difficult ones for Hull High School. Our first two years were still impacted by the COVID19 pandemic. Our final two years were punctuated by continued changes in leadership. Whether it was braving class scheduling during add-drop period or driving through flooded streets to get to school, we still made it through, thanks to the support of our community and one another.

I hope you’ll use what you’ve learned from navigating those uncertainties to help you with whatever path you choose to take next. Go “beyond the rotary.” Learn from a broader, more diverse range of perspectives than we have here in Hull, and let them shape the person you’ll become. I hope you find great success, and I hope you learn to fail with grace. Go into the world, and do it with the courage, tenacity, flexibility, and sense of spirit you learned at Hull High School.

Then, come back. Come back in the summer to a town with two schools instead of three, with an entirely new administration that you might not know the names of. Learn their names. Run for office, or speak up at town meeting. Vote. Support local businesses, and prevent people from building more condos. Come back to Hull with the lessons you’ve learned from getting out of here. Then give back to this community which has given so much to you.

Bring the new perspectives you’ll have from the new people you’ve met and lessons you’ve learned, and help Hull grow to become even better. We live in a town of 10,000 people, and I see 51 soon to be graduates seated on either side of me with the potential to make a serious difference in this town and in the world.

To all of you sitting on the field and in the stands, I ask that you welcome the new ideas these students bring back with the same grace, kindness, and Hull spirit that Cali once showed a new kid from California. I am forever grateful for the welcome I received from the Hull community, and I am proud to call this town my home.

Thank you, and congratulations to the class of 2024.

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