We could tell you Tuesday was unique because it included a parade – one with a beautiful handmade dragon that was danced around campus in celebration of Chinese New Year – but that wouldn’t be entirely true. We have a costume parade every Halloween, a candy-dispensing parade courtesy of Santa and his elves every December. We have a parade when our athletic teams qualify for State, and we have a parade every May – Senior Send Off, a biggie – in celebration of each and every graduating class.

At Prairie, we love a good parade.

We could tell you the day was special – beyond special, whatever the word is for quadruple a decent amount of special – because it involved our entire community gathering together. And while that is true, we also gather together a lot. (Spoiler alert: Here at Prairie, we really like each other.) We gather as a full school body at the aforementioned Senior Send Off. We gather every fall at Convocation. Heck, we gathered together just last week for our Valentine’s Buddy Program activity, young students working side-by-side with older ones, everyone creating handmade heart wreaths that were delivered to local senior living facilities and the veterans center in Milwaukee.

And while the honoring of heritages and cultures certainly made yesterday special, those are things our school community routinely makes time for as well, always pausing to acknowledge celebrations such as Native American Heritage month, Diwali, Ramadan, Rosh Hashanah, and more.

What made Multicultural Festival 2026 – the 10th annual iteration of this beloved event – uber special and unique and unforgettable, was that it was a merging of all the aforementioned things. The Prairie School Multicultural Festival, an annual celebration featuring native food, dance, music, and art, has grown so much over the past decade that this year’s event was held in the Prairie Field House, a space built in 1970 to hold approximately 2,000 people. Yesterday, it was bursting at the seams, filled with students, teachers, parents, grandparents, and even neighbors. It was filled with empanadas and pepparkakor and chicharrones. It was filled with the music of a mariachi band. It was filled with love and respect for teachers and classmates and the traditions our families hold dear.

Togetherness, curiosity, understanding – our world always needs more.

So at an event where students from all three divisions paraded an intricate, handmade, twenty-foot dragon – it’s green and yellow and red body manipulated manually by sticks – around the Multicultural Festival floor, at an event where people sang and danced and expressed themselves freely, at an event where families, often multiple generations, sat together at carefully-decorated tables filled with personal trinkets and secret recipes proudly telling stories about their history and who they are, it was easy to feel grateful.

Grateful for a day rooted in the pursuit of wisdom. For kindness. For the unique attributes that make us special.

And for Prairie, a community where spending meaningful time together isn’t an exception, but a wonderful, uplifting expectation.