When I think about what Macomb gives its young people, I keep coming back to a single word: foundation.

Not just the academic foundation — though that's here, and it shows in these pages. Something broader. The foundation of knowing that people are watching out for you. That someone will notice what you're good at before you know it yourself. That the community you come from is something you carry with you, not something you leave behind.

This issue of Flight Path belongs to eleven alumni who prove that point, over and over again, across five decades of graduating classes.

Arun Thottumkara, Harvard and Stanford, now discovering medicines for cancer and Alzheimer's in a biotech lab in San Diego, will tell you his foundation was poured right here. Brett Taylor, a Special Agent with the FBI at 29 years old, chose Western over scholarship offers from other schools because he grew up going to Bomber games and wasn't ready to stop. Raina Ames, now preparing the next generation of theater educators at the University of New Hampshire, traces her entire career back to a hallway conversation with drama director Maxine Joyce — who saw something in a shy girl that the girl couldn't yet see in herself.

That's Macomb. That's this school system.

Diane Gilbert planned 40 international business trips and left Hyderabad two hours before a bombing — but the curiosity that carried her there grew from a town where exchange students showed up in her high school and the university next door made the world feel reachable. Kim Kelley rode her bike to an elderly neighbor's house as a child, then spent a career navigating the Veterans Administration on behalf of people who couldn't navigate it alone. Henry Lee asked why not at every turn — and built a company of 150 physicians — because Macomb, he says, installed confidence and safety in him at the same time.

Darcy Holmer put it best: people don't go from A to Z. They go from A to B to C.

What you'll find in these stories is not a collection of people who escaped Macomb. You'll find people who were built by it — and who, when asked to look back, do so with gratitude and specificity and warmth. Steve Purdum is in his 43rd grade, still learning. Troy Brown still calls it home. Rachel Farr's father is still seeing patients here.

We are proud of every voice in this issue. We are proud of the community that shaped them. And we hope that somewhere in these pages, a current Bomber reads a story and thinks: why not me?

Dr. Mark Twomey Superintendent, Macomb CUSD 185