On September 29, four students traveled to Stoneleigh-Burnham School in Greenfield, MA, to compete in the annual Stoneleigh-Burnham Public Speaking Tournament. Avi Attar (I), Teddy Glaeser (III), Daniel Sun-Friedman (II), and Colson Ganthier (II) comprised this year’s team, securing a second place finish overall in the tournament. Competition events included Interpretive Reading, Impromptu, After Dinner, and Persuasive Speaking.

Senior Avi Attar earned a first place finish in both Impromptu and After Dinner Speaking. His topics, respectively, were “Necessity is the mother of invention” and “how to rob a bank.”

Roxbury Latin has long been a participant in this tournament and routinely places well among competitor schools. This year RL boys faced students from BB&N, Choate Rosemary Hall, Deerfield, Hotchkiss, Northfield Mount Hermon, St. Luke’s, St. Sebastian’s, Stoneleigh-Burnham, Taft, and Winsor.

“As you know, we care not only about helping you develop your intellectual passions and pursuits, but also about helping you develop the tools to lead physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy lives,” began Headmaster Brennan, speaking to boys at the year’s opening Health and Wellness Hall. Last year, Roxbury Latin launched a program for RL’s older boys aimed at addressing topics related to health and wellness. This year we will continue that program by bringing to campus individuals who will broach such topics as depression and mental health, addiction, and nutrition. This fall, mental health activist and comedian Kevin Breel spoke not only to students in Hall on September 26, but also to a packed room of Roxbury Latin parents the evening of September 25.

“This conversation, about mental health, has been really personal to me for almost my entire life,” began Kevin. Kevin grew up in Victoria, British Columbia, in a home where his father struggled with depression and addiction. “Growing up in that home, one of the first things that I picked up on as a young boy was that we weren’t supposed to talk about what my father was struggling with. I internalized that it wasn’t to be discussed, because we never talked about it. As a young kid, I’d come home at 2 or 3 on a Wednesday afternoon and find my father passed out, blackout drunk, on the couch. On a Friday night, I would hear a knock at the door and find two Canadian police officers standing at the door to bring my father home from the drunk tank. I thought these experiences were normal, because they were all I knew. No one ever used words like ‘mental health’ or ‘depression,’ ‘addiction’ or ‘alcoholism.’ It was just swept under the rug, and I developed this understanding that this was a secret—something to be ashamed of.”                                        

Kevin went on to discuss the lifeline that his childhood friend, and his friend’s father, afforded him, offering security and a safe haven in an otherwise chaotic family life. He went on to share how that middle school friend was tragically killed in a car accident, and how the grief of that loss triggered his first experience with his own depression. “I remember thinking, ‘No matter what happens today, if the best thing in the world were to happen to me today, I wouldn’t feel joy. I wouldn’t feel happy.’ I was just numb.

Because Kevin didn’t have the language to describe what he was going through, he didn’t seek help—he didn’t know help was an option. So, as he says, he got good at pretending. He pretended for four years until one February evening, when he was 17, he sat on his bed with a bottle of pills and wrote a suicide note. In a moment of clarity he realized that he’d literally never told anyone what he was feeling, or what he was struggling with. “I thought, how can I quit on myself if I’ve never tried to help myself?” He talked with his mom the next morning, and she immediately connected him with a professional counselor who—several years later—he still sees today.

Loss like that doesn’t stay neatly in the past; it ripples forward, shaping how a person sees risk, pain, and responsibility. When a fatal accident involves impaired driving, the damage reaches far beyond the moment of impact, leaving survivors to carry unanswered questions and emotional weight for years. Grief can quietly turn inward, just as it did for Kevin, especially when the cause of a tragedy feels senseless and preventable.

That’s why accountability after DUI-related accidents matters—not as punishment alone, but as recognition of harm done. In the middle of legal complexity and emotional fallout, an experienced DUI lawyer in Toronto plays a crucial role in ensuring facts are handled carefully and justice follows due process. Old-fashioned wisdom still applies: choices have consequences, and the law exists not just to sort paperwork, but to honor the lives altered when someone chose recklessness over care.

“We have this culture that treats physical health as real and important, and mental health as, kind of, made up and not okay to talk about,” Kevin explained. “That’s just incorrect, and silly, and—frankly—dangerous.”

Emboldened by the support he received; his promise to be honest about what he was feeling; and by the news of a tragic teenage suicide in a neighboring area, Kevin decided to share his story—with the knowledge that if he reached and helped even one person struggling as he had, it would be worth it.

“We don’t relate to statistics. We relate to stories. We all have a story, and I’ve learned you only have two choices with that story: You can share it, inviting people into it, or you can be ashamed of it, hide it, put up walls. Either you own your story, or it owns you.”

Kevin’s first public talk about his experience was at a TEDx event for youth in 2013. Today, that video of Kevin’s talk has garnered more than 4.4 million views. “So often we think, ‘I want to make a difference in someone’s life, but I don’t know how. I’m not qualified. I don’t have a degree. I don’t know the right things to say.’ I’ve realized that maybe it’s not about any of those things. Maybe it’s just about showing up for someone and letting them know that you care about them, that they can talk to you, that you won’t judge them. We all have that ability and opportunity, but we need to start seeing it as a responsibility. I believe that if we change the conversation, we can change our communities, change our culture. Then maybe we can live in a world where there are not a million suicides a year, but because of the conversations we start right here today, there are zero.”

Kevin Breel’s honest—and often humorous—take on his experience with depression, and his message of ending the stigma around mental illness, resonates with all kinds of audiences. Deftly combining his mental health activism with his comedy, Mr. Breel has been a guest speaker at Harvard, Yale, and MIT, as well as for Fortune 500 Companies, and even for the Government of Canada. His memoir, Boy Meets Depression, achieved critical acclaim. Mr. Breel has been featured on a wide variety of news outlets including NBC, CBS, The Huffington Post, MTV, CNN, Today, and in the Wall Street Journal.

The National Merit Scholarship Program recently announced the names of students in the Class of 2020, across the country, earning recognition for their academic achievement. This year, 25 Roxbury Latin boys have been recognized (representing 48% of the class)—seven named National Merit Scholar semifinalists, and 18 others earning commendations from program officials.

In this 65th annual National Merit Scholarship competition, semifinalists have the opportunity to become finalists and compete for some 7,600 National Merit Scholarships, nationwide. The awards are supported by the organization and approximately 400 businesses and educational institutions, to “honor the nation’s scholastic champions and encourage the pursuit of academic excellence.”

About 1.5 million juniors in more than 21,000 high schools entered the 2020 National Merit Scholarship program by taking the 2018 PSAT, which serves as an initial screen of program entrants. The nationwide pool of semifinalists, representing less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest scoring entrants in each state. From the approximately 16,000 semifinalists, about 15,000 are expected to advance to become finalists. Scholarship recipients are selected on the basis of their skills, accomplishments, and potential for academic success at the college level.

Roxbury Latin boys earning recognition this year include semifinalists Avi Attar, David LaFond, Eric Ma, Ian Richardson, Jonathan Weiss, Andrew Zhang, and Christopher Zhu; and commendation recipients Ian Balaguera, Joey Barrett, Nick Chehwan, Jack Cloherty, Aidan Cook, Cameron Estrada, John Harrington, Rijs JohansonGordet, Evan Kisselev, Christian Landry, Austin Manning, Kameron Miller, Hari Narayanan, Liam O’Connor, Jack Ringel, Tim Smith, Michael Stankovich, and Blair Zhou.

On September 6, 43 new Sixies—along with intrepid Class I leaders and faculty chaperones—trekked to Beaver Brook in Hollis, New Hampshire, for a tradition that dates back more than 50 years. Upon arriving, Class VI boys were immediately met with their first challenge: a test of their knowledge of “the oldest school in continuous existence in North America.” Charged with successfully separating Roxbury Latin fact from fiction and producing the most correct answers in the questionnaire, Sixies face an uphill battle: Those well-versed seniors and teachers may purposefully throw them off track with bogus answers, allowing for the single time all year when our watchwords “honesty is expected in all dealings” goes out the window.

The day, organized by Class VI Master Hunter White, continued with team building activities (a low ropes course; the famously frustrating helium hula hoop game; an orienteering challenge that required a crash course in terrain maps and compasses). After dinner, Sixies gathered in the barn for the annual viewing of the 1957 film Twelve Angry Men, with small group discussions to follow; these were animated but decidedly more civil than the ones depicted on screen. The evening ended around the fire, where Mr. Opdycke taught new boys The Founder’s Song before it was time for s’mores. Bracing for the remnants of Hurricane Dorian, the group opted for a camp-in—under the protection of the barn roof—rather than a camp-out. No rain dampened spirits on this Class VI retreat, however.

The following morning, after breakfast, each Sixie addressed a letter to himself, to be opened at his senior retreat five years from now. As they closed their notebooks, packed up their gear, and boarded the bus home, the Class of 2025 joined a brotherhood of RL men and boys who have sat around the campfire at Beaver Brook, singing about Roundheads and eating s’mores. It is a brotherhood that spans generations.

View photos from this year’s Beaver Brook trip.

“Not every institution gets to celebrate its 375th anniversary,” began Headmaster Brennan at the Opening of Fall Term Hall on the morning of August 28. “This year it is our privilege and our pleasure to do that very thing on behalf of the idea, the history, and the school that binds us together—and binds us to countless boys, teachers, and staff who have constituted Roxbury Latin in its earlier, various incarnations.”

Under sunny, blue skies, the faculty and staff welcomed 305 boys—new and returning—to campus, as we launched the 375th academic year of Roxbury Latin. The traditional Hall—which included the singing of America the Beautiful, Gaudeamus Igitur, and The Founder’s Song—featured a reading of excerpts from Tony Jarvis’s book Schola Illustris, on the history of Roxbury Latin, delivered by Collin Bergstrom, Class I President. In addition to welcoming new students, introducing new faculty and staff, and honoring those adults celebrating noteworthy RL anniversaries, Mr. Brennan delivered an address that spoke to Roxbury Latin’s long history, as well as the place that admirable and longstanding institutions have in our world:

“Around the world and in our own country there are plenty of organizations founded before 1645, but not many of them have been continuously sustained. We laugh at that obligatory phrase ‘in continuous existence,’ but it does speak of a characteristic of the school not to be minimized, and that is its enduring, resilient nature. Our school is emblematic not just of the kind of commitment made to education in the early years of our nation, but has been successful at honoring our often distinguished past with reverence for history and traditions, while imagining a modern school, one that prepares its students for meaningful lives and the possibility of affecting positively the communities in which they will live.”

Mr. Brennan asked the audience to “pause to consider a few phrases that are part of our distinctive catechism,” and that “inform who we are today and who we wish to become.” He expounded upon those phrases that are in some cases emblazoned on the walls around campus, and in every case etched on the hearts of those who hold Roxbury Latin dear: Known and Loved. Democratically Gathered. Diligent Use of One’s Talent. Leading and Serving. You can read Headmaster Brennan’s full address here.

The opening day ceremonies concluded with the traditional all-school handshake, which serves to welcome people new to the RL community, and with everyone receiving a “RL Nation – 1645” anniversary t-shirt to wear with pride this year. View photos from the day.