The Westridge campus came alive as students, families, and employees gathered during Convocation to celebrate the start of the 2026-2027 school year on August 26. Convocation, held on Herrick Quad, included remarks from ASB President Shania W. '27 and Ms. Kassar and introductions of new faculty and staff joining our community this fall. 

Convocation Remarks, Andrea L. Kassar, Head of School
August 26, 2026

Happy New School Year! A special welcome to all of our new students, to new families, to our 4^th graders, and to our seniors—Class of 2027, we are very excited for your senior year and I know that you will be wonderful leaders for our school this year.

Last week, I had the chance to speak with our student leaders in ASB, Student Voices, and Student Life about their hopes for this school year and the culture and community they want to foster. They said:

• a sense of curiosity rather than certainty or judgment
• enthusiasm
• a spirit of togetherness
• supporting and relying on each other and cheering each other on
• inter-grade friendships
• an openness to new ideas and changes
• having self-compassion
• slowing down sometimes in the busyness of it all to appreciate the moment

These are excellent leadership goals; I can’t wait to partner with all of you and our seniors in leading the school together this year.

As some of you may already know about me, something I really like to do is see plays or musicals. I can’t wait for the wonderful plays and musicals you will produce this year too! I saw a bunch this summer: Ragtime, Oh Mary, Buena Vista Social Club, and Death of a Salesman. But one play that I have been thinking about a lot (and that connects to the students’ goals of slowing down and appreciating the moment) is called Every Brilliant Thing. In this one-person play with audience participation, the narrator names many everyday things that make life beautiful, worthwhile, and more alive. For instance, the color yellow, hammocks, comfy beds, water fights, ice cream, a much-needed sneeze. And this concept of “every brilliant thing” reminded me of a term that I heard in a head of school gathering a few months ago: “outsized joy.” When I first heard this phrase, it really stuck with me—while I’ve heard people talk a lot about joy recently, I hadn’t ever heard it paired with the word “outsized.” Now, you probably know what a pet peeve is, right? Something you find annoying that is kind of small and maybe many others don’t find it as annoying as you do. Well, “outsized joy” is just like that, except it’s the direct opposite. Something perhaps small that you find gives you more joy than most people. So, for instance, one of mine might be drying off in the sun after a swim, or doing better than my husband, Tim, at the daily Wordle. I hope this school year you might share some of your outsized joy things with each other, and with your teachers and me.

What’s also fun to think about is what is one of your outsized joy things is at Westridge. I recently asked faculty and staff to share some of theirs, and there were so many good ones:

• the smell of orange blossoms at certain times of the year on campus
• the sound of LS students laughing
• sitting at the faculty/staff lunch table outside the Commons and seeing all the bustle of students between class periods
• the campus bunnies
• the sound of the student orchestra when they play outside
• a packed house on Frank Field for CIF games

One of mine is seeing a senior reading in the hammock outside my office.

Try to see if you can add new outsized joys to your list this year. There’s a kind of noticing and staying present and slowing down and gratitude in outsized joy, and I think hearing others’ outsized joy things can help you learn more about each other in order to form deeper friendships and build community. And they help us stay the course and sustain our sense of momentum when it comes to living our complex human lives and championing the things we value most, like our school mission: Westridge is a forward thinking girls’ school committed to developing intellectually adventurous thinkers and courageous, compassionate leaders.

Another topic I’ve been thinking about this summer came from an International Coalition of Girls’ Schools conference I attended and that is the idea of grace. Grace is connected to so much of what school life must be about: you need grace with self and others when trying new things, when welcoming new people. Change requires grace, establishing a sense of belonging requires grace, combatting perfectionism requires grace, teamwork requires grace. Grace is required to embrace intellectual adventure, to be a courageous and certainly compassionate human being and citizen.

And grace is interesting because like so many words, it’s sort of hard to define. It can connote ease and fluidity, something pleasing, good manners, mercy for others, benevolence and good will, a reprieve, in religious terms a God-given virtue or a prayer before sustenance, and in Greek mythology, the Graces are givers of charm and beauty. In all cases, there is something peaceful about grace; a kind of deescalation, not one that sweeps important or urgent things under the rug, but rather is based in mercy and compassion, common humanity, and even love. When we’ve asked faculty and staff to say what receiving grace from a colleague looks like to them, here are some things they’ve said:

• offering support to another when you can see they are overwhelmed
• staying in the conversation and accepting non-closure sometimes
• assuming positive intent and remembering that none of us operates at 100% every day

This stuff is important—it is mission sustaining—it keeps the heartbeat of a school community alive.

These two themes came together for me as I was thinking about the coming school year and came across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by UVA law and education professor, James E Ryan. He writes that while “difficult conversations” have gotten a lot of attention in recent years in school communities, “easy conversations," he argues, are essential to building the relationships that will hold community together when difficult conversations become necessary. And schools are places where we need to be having difficult conversations, right? We need to learn about opinions other than our own and be open to changing our minds sometimes. We need to be able to disagree and still work on projects together and still be friends. How boring would life be if we all agreed all the time—so having difficult conversations is an important skill we aim to develop in students.

Professor Ryan says college leaders, should “create as many opportunities as possible for students to run into each other and relentlessly encourage them to get to know one another. Suggest they learn each other’s story...(E)asy conversations serve as a foundation for harder ones. ...The real conversations begin when there is enough trust to talk about difficult moments in your life, your hope and ambitions, your successes and failures.”

It seems to me that sharing things like each other’s “outsized joys” and giving each other grace are some of the very building blocks of the day-to-day easy conversations that enable us to get to know each other, to trust each other more, and ultimately, as so many Westridge alums speak about, to build the lifelong friendships that hold this community together for decades and generations to come. In times when there are many forces trying to cause our separation and that sadly can increase our loneliness and sense of isolation, the everyday bridge-building that comes from admiring life’s simple joys with a friend or colleague, that comes from compassion rather than quick judgement, that comes from daily easy conversations helps us to see deeper into each other’s full humanity and perhaps leads to not only the longevity of each person, but to the longevity of a community.

And remember: for Westridge, it is Surgere TentamUS: WE strive to rise, not I strive to rise. We as in girls and women, we as in those who serve and live out Westridge’s mission, we who want so much for our future world to be filled with courageous and compassionate leaders—and commit our lives every day to striving to make that happen.

I could not be more honored to lead this extraordinary school community. And I could not be more excited to begin the school year with all of you. Here’s to a school year of brilliant things, outsized joy, grace for ourselves and others, and the easy conversations that bind us all together. Let’s have an amazing school year!