Co-Op High School | Downtown | Education & Youth | Arts & Culture | New Haven Schools | Arts & Anti-racism
Top: Salutatorian Lauriann Burt. Bottom: Grads celebrate after the ceremony. Nicolas Eaton, at the bottom right, said that making the transition during Covid-19 was a struggle for him.
When Co-Op senior Lauriann Burt sat down to write a graduation speech, she turned to ChatGPT for help. After her first attempts seemed detached, she gave it a direction: a speech “that sounds like an urban teenager, with a witty sense of humor.”
The response it spit out—Yo yo yo, what’s crackin’, fam?!—made her realize that AI could never replace the work she did on stages and behind the scenes as a young performing artist. That it couldn’t spin language into lyricism, or use dance to bend time and space, or sing a whole world into being. That whatever the world threw at her next, she had nothing to worry about—and neither did her classmates.
Thursday, Burt brought that message to a cap-and-gown-dotted College Street, as Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School graduated 120 seniors and celebrated the Class of 2024 at the Shubert Theatre. Amidst ear-shattering cheers, fiery dance moves, and teary embraces, graduates reflected on a challenging four years, from remote school and unexpected social anxiety to the educators who helped get them through.
“We don’t need to worry about AI replacing us,” said Burt, who made the school’s theater department her second home for four years. “We have original thinking, creative minds, true authenticity. And most importantly, ever-evolving cultures, full of history, art, music, play and connection. This is what separates—no—what makes us better than AI.”
Top: De’Andre Anthony Watt. Bottom: Ariana Lenae Williams, who blew kisses to the audience as she crossed the stage.
It tapped into a sense of accomplishment and relief that speakers, from school administrators to Co-Op grad and West Haven State Rep. Trenée McGee, all folded into their remarks. When members of the Class of 2024 began their studies at Co-Op, it was online, in what would become nearly two full years of remote learning.
When they returned—some in April 2021 and some the following August—many didn’t know how to navigate a new normal. They struggled with masks and social distancing. They braved the Omicron surge and battled pandemic-induced learning delays. They learned how to return to musical theater, dance and band with new public health guidelines in place. They made it through.
Nowhere was that triumph of learning and belief in young artists clearer than in Burt’s speech, which filled the Shubert with waves of warm, rolling laughter that an attendee could nearly reach out and touch. Taking the podium, Burt told fellow graduates that she started playing with AI last week, in part out of the fear that technology is quickly replacing artists.
Top: Band student Darnell Louis Charles. Bottom: Dance grad Moenaya Grimes.
While she was completing high school, the world saw the birth of programs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. In the last year, programs like Meta, Gmail and Instagram have built in AI features, from language prediction to search functionality. In the thick of it, artists have sounded the alarm on the role of AI in both artmaking itself and making a living as an artist. Young artists, Burt said, are perhaps the most vulnerable, because they’re just starting out.
"Now we have to think of our futures in a way that no generation has before," she said with a pause that was somehow both ominous and chipper. "We've had to ask ourselves what profession we can go into where we won't be replaced by artificial intelligence. Yes, we are artists. But DALL-E and ChatGPT can paint and write too."
Except, of course, when they can't. When Burt started futzing around with ChatGPT, she saw it working—or not working—in real time. In seconds, it scoured the internet for an authentic young, urban voice, and came up with what sounded like an Eminem-Macklemore mashup at a bad Halloween party. Or in her words, “a cis/het white man who grew up in suburbia, works in a gray cubicle, and has ne-ver heard of the words ‘creative thinking.’”
Co-Op grads, she realized, would be just fine. She took a beat, beaming at her classmates, and then began to single them out—doing exactly the thing of which ChatGPT is incapable. She tapped right into their humanity.
Top: Theater's Adrian Solocio. Bottom: Jayla Anderson, who studied dance.
She looked to De’Andre Anthony Watt, nestled in a row of 12 creative writers at the front of the auditorium. Maybe ChatGPT could pull from millions of music samples in an instant—but it wouldn’t ever match Watt’s lyrical flow when he got going on a rap, she said. In the audience, cheers and applause exploded from every direction, so buoyant that Burt had to pause before she continued.
There was Janiya Burton, a theater student who participated in the school’s musical for all four years—including just months after she entered the school, and Co-Op staged F.A.M.E. as a virtual musical. She shouted out Darnell Charles, a band and percussion student who can get a whole room of students excited to learn just by being there and opening his mouth.
She nodded to Travis James, who is endlessly kind, and to visual artist Jazlyn Urias, whose design for a t-shirt united the senior class. Senior year wouldn’t have been the same, she continued, without Andrew Johnson, a fellow theater student who devised over a dozen handshakes just to keep things interesting.
At every mention, the Class of 2024 burst into applause, cheering as much for themselves and their work as they were for their classmates.
Top: Jaime Harris with Arts Director Amy Migliore. Bottom: Mariajose Ramirez-Zambrano.
As they leave the College Street arts school for the wider world, Burt encouraged them to hold fast to the expressions that make them each unique. While she plans to study molecular biology at Connecticut College, she said she’ll hold onto the skills that the theater department gave her for her whole life.
"We are lucky to be surrounded by classmates, friends, family and community from extraordinarily diverse backgrounds and experiences,” she said. “A community of brilliant voices that is so often overlooked."
McGee, who graduated from Co-Op in 2012 and now represents West Haven in the Connecticut General Assembly, echoed that importance and singularity of an arts education. For her, it was Co-Op’s acting classes and workshops that helped her make eye contact with people. When she took AP Gov, it made her realize that a career in public service and advocacy was possible—and that it could live alongside her love of the arts.
Top: Tamia Liann Robinson with dance teacher Lindsey Bauer. Bottom: Valedictorian Sophia Rivkin.
Years of tech rehearsals, meanwhile, prepared her to bring her own show to life—which she did earlier this year, when she premiered Call Forth A Woman at the Shubert. At the state legislature, she used what she learned at Co-Op to introduce a tax credit for theaters and propose a bill on art therapy programming for veterans.
“I can’t help but stress how important it is to value the education we are all afforded,” she said, encouraging graduates to remain curious and give themselves permission to experiment and to fail. “Life will have many unfavorable outcomes, but don’t give up! Rather, get up, get through, and get it out of your way.”
A strings student and young climate activist who is headed to Yale University in the fall, Valedictorian Sophia Rivkin also praised her classmates for making it to the end of the year. When the Class of 2024 started online four years ago, she remembered, her school days were a constant, still-bizarre churn of lessons held on Google Meet, where classmates saw each other in inch-high boxes. It was only after returning sophomore year that “the magic of our school became clear to us,” she said.
“We saw firsthand how art performances could easily unify any class, and how teachers were willing to drop everything to help students navigate their emotions,” she remembered. “This intense sense of community and support only grew as we struggled through SATs, college applications, and most recently, senioritis.” A cascade of laughs followed.
Now, she sees not the baby-faced teens who physically entered the school in masks three years ago, but over 100 young adults ready to greet the world. Before they all scattered, she urged them to live more fully in the present, instead of struggling through it to get to the future. If they continue to do that, she said, she fears that they’ll miss out “on the joy, learning and growth surrounding us every day.”
Top: Samaia Brantley (in cap and gown) with her grandmother, Paulette Branch, her aunt Kendra Payne, and her mom, Sondi Branch-Collins. Bottom: Ariana Williams, who studied theater.
Those words resonated on College Street, as students picked up their diplomas and posed for photos outside the theater. Nicolas Eaton, a strings student under teacher Henry Lugo, held fast to the reminder as he prepared for a fall of classes at Gateway Community College, from which he hopes to ultimately transfer.
For him,“Covid created a lot of social anxiety” that he’s still working through in and outside of school, he said. After finishing eighth grade at Celentano Biotech, Health and Medical Magnet School, Eaton assumed that he would be able to coast into high school, with an approach that looked like “staying up all night, sleeping all day.”
Instead, the transition was a rude awakening. His grades struggled. He missed social interaction. When he returned to in-person school in tenth grade, “it felt weird,” he remembered. “The hallways felt really dead. When someone got Covid, there was a lot of fear.”
The pandemic stayed with him—and with many of his classmates. Until seeking out help this year, Eaton experienced anxiety that was so high “it made me antisocial,” he said. With the help of both therapy and teachers, he was able to cope. “I’m healing,” he said.
Dene Whittaker, a student in creative writing, remembered how hard it was to return in-person her sophomore year, and realize that her social skills were still where she’d left them in middle school. It was thanks to writing teachers Ben Nelkin and Katie Yates that she made it to graduation.
As they encouraged her to try her hand at poetry, memoir, and journalism, “they taught me to be a leader,” she said. In the fall, she plans to study health science at Eastern Connecticut State University.
Other students credited teachers, friends, and family for helping them make it through. Samaia Brantley, a strings student who struggled with course work senior year, thanked both Lugo and her parents for some tough love that kept her motivated. In the theater department, Ariana Williams beat depression and her cousin’s unexpected passing with the support of her friends and classmates. For Adayah Saucier, it was tech theater teacher Janie Alexander, who always seemed willing to listen, who made graduation possible.
“I couldn’t have made it through without her,” she said.