Edson Velasco-Schwartz's 2025 Senior Convocation Speech

Photo Credit to the Bush School

Hello, and thank you. My name is Edson Anselmo Velasco-Schwartz, and I am your senior speaker on this beautiful day at Convocation! I want to thank Matt, Christine, Ingrid, Sara Fischer, and Sarah Smith for this honor, all of the teachers and faculty that have gotten me to the place I am now, my parents, my band, Percy Abram, and all my friends standing over there, hopefully not judging me too hard. 

What does it even mean to have Courage? I could ask you that and get a thousand different answers right now, because ultimately, the Courage we normally think of is just a buzzword like compassion, community, or honesty. None of these words have value until you define them with your actions, and for that reason, to be Courageous can feel incredibly daunting. How can you have Courage when your life pales in comparison to the stereotypical Courage a firefighter takes with them as they rush into a burning building? What I want to tell you today is that Courage never starts grandiose; it grows, just as you have, and just as you will. It is not just the strength to do something valiant, but the force that keeps you going each day.

While we have grown up learning about great moments of Courage in history, such as the Stonewall riots or Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt March. For me, Courage can be something as small and as terrifying as playing with my emo band anywherebuthere live. The music I write holds my memories and experiences, so performing it means sharing a part of myself with a crowd I don't really know. But I am never alone on that stage. My band, Gus, Mal, and Josh, are right up there with me. They are my family, whether on or off the stage; we lift each other up, and after every show, we are honest with each other. We share what went well, what could be better, and how we can grow. That trust, that willingness to be vulnerable, is just as Courageous as being a firefighter.

That is because Courage is actually an incredibly small thing. In my thirteen years at the Bush School, I have seen it in every corner of day-to-day life growing up on this campus; it is so small, it hides itself among our everyday routines. But when you look, Courage shows itself here through our conversations with new students, our successes and failures, our support of our friends, our crying on each other's shoulders, and ultimately, our honesty to each other. And through all of that, no matter what else you do, we show Courage by even waking up in the morning, getting out of bed, and facing the day. We are fortunate to have that supportive community here at the Bush School, and just like playing live, it is those small acts of Courage compounding across the school that define our campus. 

Courage is wearing the badge of your identity on your breast when you show up to school. For me, it is being Hispanic, it is being male, it is my long black hair and my dark brown eyes; it is being queer, it is the millions of parts of my identity that I willingly choose to show to the world, and when I get here to the Bush School, Courage is the albeit small but complex melting pot of culture, race, sex, gender and humanity that any institution shares together. We live in a community that supports and cares for its students. And through this privilege, no—this power we are granted at this school, we can make change on a citywide, or even statal scale. So when we are given the privilege and power to be Courageous and support our community here at Bush, it begs the question: What does it mean for us to have the Courage to listen to, embrace, learn from, and accept a world larger than just ourselves?

In writing this speech, I was very fortunate and privileged to have the ability of visiting my grandparents and extended family in Ecuador over the summer. And at the dinner table, I asked what Courage meant to them. They told me how in Spanish, they say Coraje, and like its English counterpart, how it means bravery, how it means standing up for what's right. But they also told me how Coraje means anger, the kind of anger that stirs inside you when you see injustice. And that's what’s different, because Coraje doesn't just stop at recognizing issues, but it fills you with the force to act. And in our United States and abroad, to have Coraje is to recognize the issues others face that we as a community are privileged enough to be guarded from. 

What we can all take from my Abuelo’s explanation, is this: as a Bush community, we can’t just appreciate the power and privilege that we are given at this school, the privilege to not think about these issues and to keep ourselves, our children, and our families sheltered away from frontiers of war and walls of hate, but we must have the Courage to act, to give and give and give and give and give and give and give and give and give and give and give again that which you have to spare. We must address those in our greater community that don't have as much as we do; we must not shelter ourselves away inside the borders of our institution. 

We come to the Bush School to learn, to watch our children grow and become ready for the world, but what purpose does any of that growth have if we don't share it with those that need it more than us? To have Coraje is to be angry, angry together, and to turn that anger into remedy. Here, from the first days of kindergarten, we've been planting the seeds of something larger than ourselves. Here, from middle school, we have traveled the world on our electives and worked within our community. Here, from high school, we have Cascades, clubs, and ambitions, but is it enough? The Courage inside all of us binds us together. We are different from other schools because we can think differently, we can look different, we can be different people, and still, we come to the same place to learn each day. That unity here lets us move mountains, so in this period of transition, both within our school and the affront to democracy in our current United States, we must open the conversation to how we can be doing more with the power we have access to. I ask, with the greatest compassion for this school that has formed me into the person I am now, where do we go from here? We stand at the perfect time not just to change, but to improve. 

So in this 2025-2026 school year, walking through the entrance each morning, I hope you ask yourself: what will I have the Courage to do today? And although you might start small, helping with a friend's homework, supporting that one shy new student, maybe even playing your first show with a new band. Why don't we do something greater? You have been given that power to do great things in our community, our city, our state, or even our world. We have been doing small acts of Courage our entire lives; now is our time to break out of this box and act. And if you still aren’t ready yet, I assure you the Bush School will nurture within you the power to change the world. That is our responsibility, that is our message of Courage, and whether you knew it or not, you have always had that power to do great things.