After all the community reporting and research we do here at The Bee week after week, year after year, it is humbling to admit how little we know about Newtown.

Yes, we know that it is 60 square miles, with 25,000-plus people and 288 miles of roads with an average elevation of 600 feet. We know all about the issues that come before local boards and commissions. We know, for example, there are about 5,400 students in our seven public schools and that we pay net costs of $9,300 for each of them. We even know many of these students by name, having written countless stories about their academic or athletic ability, their musical and theatrical talents, and, alas, their occasional forays into trouble. But in scanning the faces of the Class of 2003 at graduation ceremonies this week and watching their parents watch them, we caught countless fleeting glimpses of exchanged glances, emotions welling up against restraint, and long, long, lingering hugs. Each small, almost hidden, gesture between parent and child, between friends, between teacher and student, only hinted at volumes of untold stories that fill the lives of every human being. We regret that there are so many stories we will never get to tell.

Each year, graduation at Newtown High School is in essence the story of these many unheralded lives. Beyond all the statistics and individual achievements racked up by the graduating class, and beyond the speeches about transitions and moving on, there remains an underlying theme:  we are all in this life together. As a community, we have cause to celebrate the progress of children into adulthood, even when the children are not our own. Their untold stories are, in the end, so similar to the stories we would tell about ourselves if anybody were interested enough pay attention –– stories of hope, frustration, transcendence, disappointment, excitement, boredom, anticipation, apprehension, epiphany, and blindness.

With each passing commencement ceremony, we come to know a little bit more about Newtown. That we try in earnest as a community to educate 5,400 children so that they will be able to live through the story of their lives with some measure of success suggests that we, too, have learned something over time. For one thing, we have learned to pay attention to children, understanding that the more we support and celebrate their hopeful commencements the more we are likely to find happy endings in our own life stories. It is humbling to admit that we don’t know more about why life works this way, but it does.