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07/07/2021 08:30 AMWhen Kyle Northrup got an email in March asking him to meet virtually with Daniel Hand High School (DHHS) Principal T.J. Salutari the following morning, he wasn’t sure what to expect.
Kyle jokes, “It’s never a good thing, I guess, to receive an email telling you to meet with the principal. I assumed it wasn’t a bad thing, but I didn’t know specifically what it was.”
Turns out Salutari wanted to give Kyle the news that he was valedictorian of the 281-member DHHS Class of 2021. Kyle says he was eager to tackle the task assigned to all valedictorians: writing and giving a speech. In it, he displays a wisdom beyond his years.
He wrote, “As we get older, the indicators of success will change, and the stakes will increase. We will be tempted to pursue wealth over friendships and careers over family. When these temptations come, look back on the lessons of 2020. Remember how you felt when our school community disappeared. And remember how you felt when it came back.”
School and Family
Kyle will attend the University of Notre Dame in Indiana in the fall and tentatively plans to major in economics. The school attracted him for several reasons, one being that his brother, Christian, just finished his first year there.
“That was appealing to me to go to the same school as him,” Kyle says. “Also, I really loved the culture of the school, the student body and the school spirit. The school spirit is so, so huge there, and I could tell visiting it that everyone that went there seemed to love it. Even people that had graduated decades ago that I knew also still seem to love it and still went to multiple football games a year. So the strong feelings students and alumni have toward it made me feel like it was a special place.”
Family is a major theme in Kyle’s life. His father, David, was born in Minnesota and works in the pharmaceutical industry. His mother, Julie, is a Connecticut native and homemaker. Kyle’s sister, Sheila, will be a sophomore in high school in the fall.
Kyle fondly describes a “legendary” event for which his extended family gathers every summer.
“I have a big Irish Catholic family and every summer we have a clambake with all, I think, 16 of my cousins and about 10 aunts and uncles, so that’s a pretty legendary event in my family,” he says. “Always one of the best days of the year, the clambake.”
Kyle says he can attribute a large portion of his academic success to actions his parents took earlier in his life.
“My parents didn’t put much pressure on me in high school. They didn’t check my grades online or anything like that,” he explains. “I think they were able to do this because they trusted me to be responsible.”
When Kyle was younger, his parents read to him daily.
“Our house always had a lot of books, and I read them,” he says. “I didn’t realize it at the time, obviously, but what my parents were doing was fostering a love of learning in me. Combined with a trusting relationship, that enabled me to enjoy my classes in high school without much stress. It would have been more difficult to maintain high levels of academic achievement over a long period of time in any other situation.”
Kyle’s family lived in Mystic when he was born, and his father’s job took the family to England when Kyle was three. They moved to Madison when Kyle was seven and have been here ever since. His memories of England, perhaps unsurprisingly, center partly around school.
“I remember specifically the school uniforms,” Kyle recalls. “You’d be seven years old wearing a tie to school every day, which you just don’t see here.”
Other memories are vivid, as well.
It’s so easy to travel there, so close to all those cities. I remember visiting places in Italy and Paris and all those on school vacations, which was really cool,” he says.
How He Did It
Kyle offers some words of wisdom to other students seeking success, but his advice can apply to almost anyone.
“I probably have two main pieces of advice. The first is just to do what you’re interested in,” he says. “For me, I was interested in world events and international relations, so I did things like debate and Model U.N.
“I’d say don’t design your schedule in school and out of school to be appealing to colleges, just do what you’re interested in and then if you’re interested in things you’ll excel in them, I think. Then I’d also say to make sure you have balance in your life between school, hobbies, family, and sleep, all of that,” he continues. “I think a lot of people tend to neglect the balance in pursuit of their goals.”
Kyle seems to take his own advice. On the last day of June, on which temperatures broke 90 degrees in Madison, he had gone for a run.
“I do that after school most days,” he says.
He also golfs, played clarinet in DHHS’s concert and marching bands all four years, has taken piano lessons for a decade, and was in Boy Scouts for about eight years.
He says achieving balance “was something, especially through high school, that I consciously developed, and I think that’s what it takes sometimes.”
Kyle credits the people in high school for making his time there memorable. He wants to recognize “all the students at Hand who made it a great four years. A lot of fun, a lot of friendships.”
Kyle also notes a few of the teachers who made a difference for him.
“I think one of the things I’ll remember most about Hand is some of the great teachers I had,” he says. “Mr. [Martin] Glasser in the History Department was one of them,” he says. “Mr. [Paul] Birdsall, I had him for two years in math and he really helped me to love the subject, and then Mrs. [Laura] Stott for U.S. History—that class was so entertaining and so interesting, and Mrs. [Sarah] Tibbetts, as well, in the Science Department.”
He says building good relationships with his teachers helped him to succeed.
“Being friendly and respectful to your teachers on a daily basis, and even little things like showing up to class on time every day, builds you a lot of credit,” he says, “because maybe when you need something from a teacher, they’re much more willing to do it for you because you’ve built up a lot of trust.”
Living Through History
While Kyle unsurprisingly was enrolled in almost all A.P. classes his junior and senior years, his description of a favorite project helps to illustrate his brainpower.
“At the end of my U.S. history class, we did an oral history project where you had to talk to someone that you knew who had experienced a piece of history and then interview them for an hour and then do a big write up. I did mine with my uncle who worked in finance during the financial crisis,” he says. “I did this in spring 2020, so it was really interesting to compare the 2008 financial crisis with all the economic problems because of COVID and then write about all of that in an academic setting. That was a really interesting project that was also relevant, and after a year of studying history by reading a textbook, it helps you understand how historians think and how they work and how we actually create the history that we read or how historians create the history that we read.”
Kyle himself has experienced a piece of history, which he referenced in his speech on graduation day: attending school during a worldwide pandemic.
“The emptiness of school and of life during the pandemic will soon be a memory,” he said in his graduation speech. “But that doesn’t diminish its impact on us. We entered the pandemic as children and emerged from it as adults, so, our age group, perhaps more than any other, was irrevocably shaped by the past 15 months.”
In an interview a few weeks after graduation, he says spring 2020 was nice academically for him because remote learning was much less work than usual. When the school adopted a hybrid model at the start of the 2020-’21 academic year, he appreciated being able to wake up later some days and have lunch at home.
“As the winter dragged on, it got kind of boring to be by yourself,” he says, “but it also made you appreciate being in person for two or three days a week. You’d be having a conversation with your friends in the hallway, and you’d know that you shouldn’t take that for granted because you didn’t have it a couple of days a week.”
Finally, in March, DHHS moved to all in-person instruction.
“That was a really fun few months, especially the last couple months of high school, to be with everyone,” Kyle says.
A large part of Kyle’s experience included the simple, but not necessarily easy, task of persevering.
“I guess all in all, you kind of get on with your life,” he says. “When you’re going through the daily experiences, you’re not really thinking, ‘This is so crazy that we’re online,’ you’re kind of just thinking, ‘I have this physics test tomorrow that I need to figure everything out for,’ so I think learning about adaptation and doing it was a big part of my experience looking back.”